232 A HUNDEED YEAES 



The people on the west coast used firmly to believe 

 that events which were going to happen were often fore- 

 told by supernatural sounds and sights. 



On our purchasing Inverewe and deciding to make 

 our home on the neck of the Plocaird, I began to make 

 enquiries as to what special use had been made of that 

 promontory in the old days, when the Mackenzies of 

 Lochend, who were offshoots of our family, owned the 

 place. I was told by the old people round about us, 

 whose parents at least had lived in those days, that the 

 Plocaird was where Fear cheannloch (the man or laird of 

 Lochend) kept his cows at night, for at that time most 

 of the cattle in the Highlands had no roofs to shelter 

 them summer or winter. There still remained the old 

 dyke from sea to sea across the neck of the peninsula 

 for keeping in the cows, and there was one bright green 

 little oasis among the heather where had stood the bothy 

 of the herd, Domhnall Aireach (Donald the Cowman). 

 Into this green spot I at once dibbled a lot of the good 

 old single Narcissus Scoticus, which I had got from my 

 great-uncle at Kerrysdale. How they still bloom there 

 every spring, though I planted them nearly sixty years 

 ago ! 



Among the old stories in connection with the Plocaird 

 and its sole inhabitant, Domhnall Aireach, I was told 

 that the old herd and his wife used to be much troubled 

 by certain uncanny sounds and apparitions, and that 

 the place was said by them to be haunted. The sounds 

 they were said to hear were just as if there had been 

 a blacksmith's forge on the shore below their bothy, and 

 there appeared at night to be a continuous hammering 



