A Summer in Skye, Volume 2 (of 2)
Alexander Smith's *A Summer in Skye, Volume 2* continues his prose travelogue of the Isle of Skye, blending landscape description, folklore, and character sketches gathered during a leisurely tour of the island's north and west. The narrator moves from the household of Mr M'Ian—an old-fashioned tacksman who governs his cotters through inherited paternal custom rather than cash rent—to that of "the Landlord," an India-seasoned proprietor whose household mixes Highland relics with Eastern curiosities and who runs a more modern, businesslike estate, complete with a "penal settlement" system for tenants in arrears and a village school. Along the way the narrator visits Portree, Dunvegan Castle (with its dungeons, Fairy Room, and the legendary Fairy Flag), the ruined stronghold of Duntulm and Flora Macdonald's neglected grave at Kilmuir, the fantastical rock formations of Quirang and Macleod's Tables, and the desolate grandeur of Glen Sligachan and Lord Macdonald's deer forest. Interwoven throughout are local legends recounted by drivers and guides—the sinking of Macdonald's barge that gave Dunvegan to the Macleods, the ghost of Donald Gorm, the Battle of the Spoiled Dikes, and the massacre in the Eig cave—alongside vivid genre scenes: a lamb-branding at the fank, a boat crossing bargained with reluctant ferrymen, and an evening of storytelling in the "Fairy Room." The volume broadens geographically and socially with an excursion to Ireland, where the narrator stays with John Penruddock, a hearty sheep-farmer, and witnesses a raucous cattle fair at Keady that erupts into a pitched brawl between Irish dealers and Welsh forgemen. A leisurely "smoking parliament" on the Landlord's lawn provides occasion for essayistic digressions comparing Highland and Irish temperament and humor, the psychology of emigration, and the promised benefits of the coming Skye railway. The book closes with the departure of a party of emigrants bound for Canada under the Landlord's paternal arrangements, and the narrator's own homeward voyage south, reflecting on the health, memories, and human encounters gained from the summer. Throughout, Smith's method is essayistic and impressionistic rather than narrative: extended set-piece descriptions of scenery (the Cuchullins, sea lochs, ruined castles) alternate with anecdote, transcribed dialect speech, and reflective passages on antiquity, clan relations, landlord-tenant paternalism, and the vanishing of old Celtic ways before modernization—epitomized by the railway that will, for better or worse, "send an electric shock through the entire Island."
By Alexander Smith · First published 1865 · Genre: Travel Writing, Essays, Memoir