One cannot live on a Scottish island without being interested in the other islands.
Hamish Haswell-Smith’s The Scottish Islands has excellent watercolour sketches; Finlay MacLeod’s The Norse Mills Of Lewis is fascinating on old mills; and Thomas McErlean and Norman Crothers’s Harnessing the Tides is a fine study of the archaeology of seventh and eighth-century tide mills at Nendrum in Northern Ireland.
But what of Mull? It has to be Charles MacLean’s The Isle of Mull: Placenames, Meanings and Stories.
There is so much folklore that incomers like me take years to assimilate the legends. Here are a few examples from the book:
Hamish Haswell-Smith’s The Scottish Islands has excellent watercolour sketches; Finlay MacLeod’s The Norse Mills Of Lewis is fascinating on old mills; and Thomas McErlean and Norman Crothers’s Harnessing the Tides is a fine study of the archaeology of seventh and eighth-century tide mills at Nendrum in Northern Ireland.
But what of Mull? It has to be Charles MacLean’s The Isle of Mull: Placenames, Meanings and Stories.
There is so much folklore that incomers like me take years to assimilate the legends. Here are a few examples from the book:
- Tobar na lesig: the lazy woman’s well. This was the nearest well to the houses at Haunn. Better water came from a more distant well.
- Tobar an air dhiomhanaich: the well of the idlemen. Not near the well above – presumably locals would gather there for a natter.
- Rubh nam buthan: point of the shops. No shops anywhere near, but stone was quarried here to build shops in Inverness.
- Clach na caraid: the stone of the (married) couple. A huge boulder, with traces of a stone wall beneath. A couple were getting married at the beginning of the 18th century. They slipped away from the reception to their cottage. In the night, a storm dislodged the boulder from the cliff above, flattening the house and occupants.
