A Summer in Skye, Volume 1 (of 2)
A Summer in Skye, Volume 1, by Alexander Smith, is a mid-Victorian travel narrative recounting the author's journey from Edinburgh through the Trosachs, Loch Lomond, Inverary, and Oban to the Isle of Skye, blending picturesque description with essayistic digressions on Scottish history, character, and folklore. The volume opens not in the Highlands but in sweltering summer Edinburgh, which Smith uses as a springboard for an extended meditation on the virtues of vacation and idleness after a year of urban toil. He surveys the city's literary and historical associations—Scott, Burns, Jeffrey, De Quincey, Boswell—contrasting the beauty and intellectual reputation of the New Town with the squalor of the Cowgate and Canongate. He reflects on Edinburgh's diminished status since the loss of its royal court, on university reform, on Scottish national sentiment (illustrated by the half-built Wallace Monument), and on the city's seasonal rhythms, culminating in a satirical account of the General Assembly's ceremonial pomp. The narrative proper begins at Stirling, comparing it to Edinburgh as a "spinster sister," then traces the classic coaching route north: Doune, Callander, the Trosachs, Loch Katrine, Loch Lomond, the "Cobbler" mountain (personified in a comic domestic-quarrel conceit), Glencroe, and Inverary, with a memorable sketch of the loquacious coachman John Campbell. Loch Awe, Kilchurn Castle, and Ben Cruachan receive lyrical set-pieces before the account reaches Oban, described as a frenzied tourist bazaar, and continues via Fort William (with a visit to the whisky distiller "Long John") and Culloden Moor, evoked in solemnly Jacobite tones. The book's centerpiece is the misadventure-laden journey to Skye itself: a nightmarish overnight coach-and-boat ordeal involving a balky horse, drunken boatmen who abandon the travelers at Plockton, a chance rescue by an old college friend turned minister, and a leaking ferry crossing to Kyleakin. Once installed at Mr M'Ian's remote farmhouse, the narrative settles into an ethnographic register, portraying the old soldier M'Ian and the melancholy priest Father M'Crimmon, the farm's social hierarchy (porch, dining-room, and "black kitchen"), and characters like the shepherd John Kelly, the jovial cattleman Lachlan Roy, and the versatile huntsman Angus-with-the-dogs, culminating in a vivid otter hunt and a boisterous reel danced to Peter's fiddle. Subsequent chapters describe an expedition to the desolate, echo-haunted Loch Coruisk beneath the Cuchullin mountains, the raucous commerce and drunken revelry of Broadford Fair (interwoven with reflections on Johnson and Boswell's earlier Hebridean tour and a pilgrimage to the ruined house of Corachatachin), and the self-sufficient rhythms of island pastoral life—milking, lamb-weaning, and shepherding—rendered with almost anthropological attention to instinct and affection among the flocks. The volume closes with a discursive "Basket of Fragments" surveying Highland history and character: the Norse origins of the islands and their place-names, the Macdonald–Macleod rivalry, a fireside legend of Ossian and the extinction of the Fingalians told by old M'Ian, the Lords of the Isles' quasi-independent rule, King Haco's invasion, and the shifting allegiance of the clans through Montrose, Killiecrankie, Glencoe, and the Jacobite risings—ending mid-episode with Flora Macdonald's rescue of the fugitive Prince Charles Edward Stuart after Culloden, a cliffhanger that carries into the second volume.
By Alexander Smith · First published 1865 · Genre: Travel Literature, Nature Writing, Essay