182 A HUNDRED YEARS 



Allan) — were a family who above all other families in 

 the place were brought up on Maorach a Chladaich 

 (the shell-fish of the shore) . But there were shell -fish and 

 shell-fish, and long ago, after sheep had been for some 

 time on what are now my lands, a change was made 

 by the then proprietor. Sir George Mackenzie of Coul, 

 and the place was let to a lot of crofters from Melvaig, 

 a township right out on the point of the Rudha Reidh. 

 Well, as there were no stretches of sand and shingle 

 out on this wild promontory and only rocks and precipices, 

 the shell-fish they had been accustomed to eat was the 

 impet and that white whelk whose English name I do 

 not know, but which is known in Gaelic as Gille Fionn 

 (white lad). So when they shifted their abode to the 

 head of Loch Ewe and had to live on oysters and 

 mussels and cockles, they thought the change of diet 

 did not altogether suit them, and, like the Israelites of 

 old, they pined for the shell-pots of Melvaig. I was 

 quite lately at the Rudha Reidh Lighthouse and passed 

 through the sites of the old Melvaig shielings, where 

 masses of limpet and whelk shells were still to be seen 

 all around. 



Here is another story of hard times. A very old 

 friend of mine, who was always known at Poole we as 

 Mackenzie of Cliff House, told me that a great-uncle of 

 his who had a farm at Kenlochewe suffered so badly 

 one spring that he lost all his cattle, with the exception 

 of one black heifer; the meal was done, and starvation 

 stared him in the face. Early in May the heifer calved, 

 and he and his wife put up a kind of bothy in Coire mhic 

 Fhearchar between Meall a Ghiubhais and Beinn Eidh, 



