12. Wae's Me For Prince Charlie

N.B.
We're up again. Finding a route into Google took me a while. Scott had less trouble getting to the North Pole, but a senile whimper seemed to touch their commercial hearts, and all of a sudden everything was O.K. Even the Cleals and Cambridges blog got onto the engine!

Some years ago, my husband and I were looking for a B&B in Arisaig. The scenery varied from beautiful to exquisite but the prices  varied from huge to superheated, and we were getting a bit desperate .Turning off the Road to the Isles, we arrived at a farmhouse. It was clean, comfortable,and had a free phone to the non-resident owner, who whisked in in minutes.

Loch nan Uamh

Faced with the information that we would have to share a bathroom, and knowing my husband's en suite fetish, I sighed and turned to him. He was getting out the wine.

Fish and chips went down a treat with South Africa's finest.

"The Prince's beach is down there."

Serendipity?

So this is where he came ashore. This is where it all started.

Camusdarach Beach, Arisaig

We watched a glorious sunset and lay listening to the crashing waves as they hit the patch of shingle, rolling the stones about. Did he listen too?

Prince Charles Edward Stuart

I've always had a problem with Prince Charles Edward Stuart. In 1688, his Catholic grandfather, King  James V11 had slipped quietly away from London before his embarrassed son-in-law, William of Orange  and even more embarrassed daughter Mary could be faced with the problem of taking over Daddy's throne, and deciding what to do with him. Catholics were bad news in England, Holland and Northern Germany, and William couldn't wait to get his hands on British tax money to continue his wars against whichever Catholic ruler he was fighting at the time.

He was involved in the Massacre of Glencoe and the English hated him but had no choice but to put up with him.

Childless, William and Mary were succeeded by James's other daughter, Anne, whose reign was chiefly remarkable for great architecture and furniture, and all of whose 13 children died. Oops, I nearly forgot! It was during Anne's reign that John Churchill, ancestor of Winston, put the British army on the map by defeating the French on numerous occasions. More of Winston later.

Another  crisis. Who could they scratch about for? They settled on George, Elector of Hanover, who spoke no English, hated England, but was descended from James VI. Apart from that, he was Protestant. To this day, a Muslim can sit on the British throne, but not a Catholic.

Failed Jacobite( Latin for James) rebellions followed, in 1715 and 1719, and some very highly placed noblemen lost their heads. But the family never gave up.

So it was that on 23 July, 1745, Prince Charles Edward Stuart landed in Eriskay. Young and handsome, a trained soldier, he seemed exactly what the downtrodden Celts were looking for.

According to legend, he scattered the seeds of a convovulus near the beach. They grow there to this day.

Calystegia Soldanella
Pink Convolvulus



Sorry, guys, the distribution maps give this the lie. BUT it seems to have been a new visitor to Eriskay at this time. Always a grain of truth in the story.

The Prince's Beach, Eriskay



Foot notes to Eriskay.

You now know where the the beautiful song, the Eriskay Love Lilt comes from. A haunting variant of the tune can be heard on the MacCormack blog. It is possibly an earlier version. She sang it to her children, "often and well".

Aunt Mary

On a lighter note. In 1941, the S S Politician sank in rough weather off Eriskay. The locals liberated large quantities of the lovely liquid. This was hidden in some inventive places. One family buried it under the cow dung.  Some of the whisky was found, but most was eventually drunk.

The local customs officer, one McColl led a positive crusade against the naughty islanders, and was infuriated with the light sentences handed down. A few went to jail some had their boats confiscated, but no one would bid against them at the sale.

In the end, permission was received to dynamite the ship, which was duly done, watched by horrified Hebrideans.

"Dynamiting whisky! you wouldn't think there were men in the world so crazy as that."

When I was at school in Inverness, the Uist boys told us that far more whisky was taken off the ship than was ever admitted, and that some was still hidden..

The real fury of the oficials was that no duty was paid on the whisky. We have another story coming up on that.

Personally, I am glad the Hebrideans scored just once.

Compton MacKenzie wrote a book, Whisky Galore which was turned into a film, starring, I think I remember Gordon Jackson, among others. We didn't think much of the dancing,or the fake accents, but it was good fun.