The Argyllshire Coast and its Islands 



scene here is a very grand one, extending over miles of 

 rock-strewn waters, where the Atlantic rollers break with 

 muffled roar and white cascades of foam. One winter an 

 American steamer had what the light-keepers consider to 

 have been a marvellous escape from destruction on these 

 rocks. The steamer's propeller had been stripped of all its 

 blades by a succession of gales and heavy seas, and before 

 a north-westerly gale the ship was drifting helplessly down 

 to the rocks, but was carried past through a narrow passage 

 of deep water, reaching the shelter of the Island of Tiree, 

 and anchoring there till the storm subsided. 



Of the two Argyllshire islands of Coll and Tiree, which 

 are separated from one another by a narrow strip of water 

 known as the Sound of Gunna, Tiree is by far the more 

 fertile, and, indeed, this island produces crops unsurpassed 

 in any of the Hebrides. Among the curious tributes which 

 Tiree paid to the chiefs of the Macleans in olden days — the 

 island passed into the possession of the Argyll family early 

 in the seventeenth century — ^were the following items, which 

 nowadays read somewhat quaintly : A payment of a sail 

 and hair tackle to Maclean's galley ; free quarters for the 

 falconers and lambs for the hawks; also quarters for all the 

 gentlemen's men — not under one hundred in number — who 

 were accustomed to wait upon Maclean during his winter 

 stay upon the island. 



Lying in the Passage of Tiree — that part of the Atlantic 

 between Mull and Coll — is a small group of grass-grown 

 islands, the Treshnish Isles by name. The most outlying 

 of these is known in the Gaelic as Bac Mor (or the Great 

 Mound), but to it for well over a century has been given 

 the English name of the Dutchman's Cap, from its fancied 

 resemblance to a round crowned hat. A couple miles nearer 

 to Mull lies Lunga, and clustering about it are a number 

 of smaller islands, among them Carn a' burg mor and Carn 

 a' burg beag. On Carn a* burg mor is the ruin of a forti- 

 fied castle, one of the early strongholds of the chiefs of the 



6i 



