Mull and Iona

Introduction

The Isle of Mull is of Isles the fairest,

Of ocean's gems 'tis the first and rarest;

Green grassy island of sparkling fountains,

Of waving woods and high tow'ring mountains.

THESE WORDS ARE AS TRUE today as when they were written over one hundred years ago by the great Mull bard Dugald MacPhail, when he was working in Newcastle, far from his homeland.

As a visitor to Mull and Iona, you will naturally want to know something about the islands before setting out to explore their highways and byways. Here, in this little book, you will find not only items of interest common to all the Hebridean islands, but also certain features unique to the two islands of Mull and Iona.

From the earliest times, Mull, the third largest of the Hebridean islands, has been the social and strategic centre of the southern Hebrides. It flanks the Firth of Lorne, where the trans-Scotland line of communications along the Great Glen opens to the sea in the west. In the days when land communication was difficult and dangerous, this almost continuous waterway was one of the very few means of contact between the west and the east of Scotland. Mainland Oban, which was called the 'Charing Cross of the Highlands' when the railway came more than one hundred years ago, lies only ten miles distant across the Firth. The sheltered Sound of Mull, with the mainland of Morvern and Ardnamurchan to the north, leads to Tobermory Bay, the finest harbour in the Hebrides, where dozens of ships, many far-travelled, used to call or shelter in past years; today it is a yachtsman's paradise. No wonder Mull of the Mountains was and still is a natural focal point.

Geologically, Mull is one of the most thoroughly researched areas of the world. Basically, it is a portion of the West Highland mainland cut off by ages of erosion, then - except for Iona and the tip of the Ross of Mull - covered up and depressed under thousands of feet of successive piled-up lava sheets that flowed from a great central volcano, from lesser vents and from a network of fissures in the land surface.

During the last thirty to forty million years the agents of erosion have worn away vast masses of rock. The sea has cut into the softer rocks, leaving long sea lochs with bold headlands of harder rocks; glens were deepened and smoothed by glaciers. The last of the ice disappeared 10/12,000 years ago, depositing the isolated boulders, the heaps of glacial detritus, the ice-scored rock surfaces we see today, some of the rocks having been carried by the ice from far up the Great Glen. Prominent, too, are the raised beaches which can be traced for miles along the coast, which mark the slow rise of the land as it was relieved of its weight of ice. Now we can see along the slopes of the hills and glens the cut-back edges of the successive lava flows, with a skyline like steps and stairs, especially in north-west Mull.

It was not only the strategic situation of Mull, but also its fertile soil and green grassy hills that attracted settlers from earliest pre-history. The presence of over forty forts and defensive structures along the south and west coasts points to the resistance put up by earlier settlers to the later waves of perhaps more warlike Celts from Ireland, when Mull became an influential part of the ancient kingdom of Dalriada.

Mull's later castles remind us of the powerful clans MacDonald and Maclean who ruled the southern Hebrides. Aros Castle, near Salen, on the Sound of Mull, and Ardtornish, on the Morvern shore opposite, were the principal seats of the Lords of the Isles, princes whose might rivalled, and indeed often threatened, that of the king himself in Edinburgh.

Sadly, evil times came with the 19th century. In 1821 there was an expanding, self-supporting population of about 10,000 in Mull and 500 in Iona. By the end of the century those figures were reduced to 4,500 and 150, and were steadily falling.

This destruction of a way of life was the responsibility of a new generation of landowners, frequently, although not invariably, newly rich industrialists from England, who had 'bought' the land from the degenerate clan chiefs, stripped now of their traditional powers by the political aftermath of the '45 uprising, often apeing the social life of the South, and in so doing becoming so desperate for cash that some of them became the most directly responsible for horrific clearances, rocketing rents, poverty, exploited emigration, and the end of the Clan System, which at its height has been described as 'the finest example of benevolent feudalism in Europe.' Protected by smug Victorian privilege, their treatment of a simple trusting people, who had no legal redress, was unforgiveable and unforgettable, even more in the case of the remote central government for its indifference and hypocrisy. While bravely putting down slavery abroad, it was ignoring such evils as the Clearances at home, while forcing opium on the Chinese literally at cannon point.

The sad story of the Clearances is well documented and Mull had more than its share. In fact, if we analyse official records, it would appear that some lairds even took pride in cunningly outwitting a trusting community, as in the north of Mull, and showed sheer cruelty in the case of the island of Ulva. Some of the indifference on the part of southerners came from a traditional contempt for Highlanders. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Prime Minister, William Pitt, is reported to have said 'I have found a new use for Highlanders: they make good cannon fodder.'

Destitution became so widespread in the area centring on Mull that the Mull Combination Poorhouse, as it was called, was built in 1862 at a convenient spot near Tobermory. It had accommodation for up to 100 to 130 homeless people. It was built and maintained by a consortium of parishes, at public expense, of course, and managed by a committee consisting mostly of the very landowners who had brought about the need for such an institution by their policy of clearances and the introduction of sheep. It was demolished in the 1970s.

It is true that in some areas a measure of depopulation was necessary, for with an increasing population the subdivision of crop-lands had brought a risk of real poverty. The evil lay in the manner in which this was forced upon the people. After the Clearances, sheep grazed among the ruined homesteads. The writer recalls that when he was a boy, an old man told him that when he was about the same age, his father carried him out of the cottage built by his forefathers, and outside the factor was waiting with a blazing torch to burn it to the ground. This happened on the island of Ulva, where the population of 500 dropped to 200 in ten years.

Anyway, in time, over-grazing by sheep fouled the land, despoiling it of the fertility built up over the centuries by mixed, chiefly cattle, agriculture, and the land was taken over by rabbits and bracken, finally reverting to barren sporting estates. Mull was no longer the fine cattle country it had been.

The visitor will notice how good land is still slowly vanishing under conifers. There is a sheep instead of a cattle economy, and a system of doles and grants handed out by a government more interested in catering to Big Industry, while keeping the economy of Mull barely ticking over. Mull, in fact, has been described as a microcosm of the whole Highlands problem. It shares with the other islands the disadvantages of high freights for the carriage of goods, and at least ten pence more on a gallon of petrol than in Oban, where the price is already much higher than in the south. With so few public services, Mull is entirely dependent on the motor car. Subsidies to equate the price of petrol to that on the mainland, and equating freight charges to road transport costs (Roads Equivalent Tariff) could well transform the economy of Mull and that of the other islands. Such subsidies would hardly be noticed in the national budget, although of course even the idea of action of that sort is anathema in the present political climate.

Since ferry communications and new standards of living were introduced in the 1950s and '60s, Mull has become an increasingly popular holiday island with a vast choice of interests and accommodation. Unfortunately, tourism is a precarious industry depending on many factors, few of them under the control of the people directly concerned.

But the great event in Mull's social history was its close association with Iona and St Columba, which is described in a later chapter. The radiance emanating from what has been called 'the morning star of Scotland's faith' was shed not only over Mull, but over Scotland, north-east England, Scandinavia (through the later Vikings), and even into Europe along the Rhine Valley. The practical, dedicated, militant monks of Iona, besides their learning and carrying of the Word to a pagan land, taught the crafts of building and carving, agriculture, and even the science of herbal medicine, which was taught by the famous Beaton family, generations of whom conducted a veritable health service from Mull throughout the Hebrides, when they were medical advisors to the households of the great chiefs of Mull. Late in the 16th century their skill was recognised even by the King of Scotland in distant Edinburgh.

Scattered over Mull there are the ruins of at least fourteen pre-Reformation chapels, which gives some indication of the influence of Iona on the social life of the people. In fact, it was the influence of Iona and its surroundings that kept civilisation alive during the dark days of lawlessness and bloodshed in...