The Adventures of Hjalmar Bjorge - Season 5, Episode 4

The Continuing Adventures of Hjalmar Bjorge
Season 5 - Episode 4 - Mingulay

Exploring the Isles of the West Cruise    April 18-May 2, 2022

After a night at the Monachs, we awoke to a morning of golden sunshine. The engines were fired up, anchor raised, and we set off to the south. Destination: Mingulay. Eighteen years had passed since I was last there, and I was looking forward to showing everyone its large puffin colony. Landing can be tricky, as the beach, which can look deceptively easy to land on, is subject to swells that can overturn a small boat. Charlie anchored just off the south shore of Mingulay Bay, where he set us ashore on the rocks near the ruin of the derrick platform that had been built in 1901. It was poorly built, and was not of much use. The struggling community finally left the island in 1912.

From the landing, we followed a track over to the old school, which has been renovated to house the ranger. Built in 1881, it saw its last pupil in 1910. The ranger was not in residence, so we had the island to ourselves.

Leaving the school, we followed 'Main Street' down to the village. Over the past century, drifting sands have half-buried the black houses near the beach. They are an odd sight, lintel stones in place a foot or two above the ground. It is as if the homes have sunk in quick-sand. The village burial ground lies just above the beach, an oval mound surrounded by a stone embankment. An early chapel dedicated to St Columba once stood on the site, and there are some fifty grave stones, most unmarked and covered by sand. 

The most substantial building here is the Priest’s House. Built of granite blocks, its ground floor had four rooms and a kitchen, which were used as quarters for visiting priests. The chapel on the upper floor, accessed by an external staircase, had been one large room, forty-five by twenty-five feet. It was in June of 1898 that Mass was first held here, celebrated by Father Allan MacDonald. There is a wonderful book about Fr Macdonald, Amy Murray’s Father Allan’s Island, written in 1920. The island referred to in the title is Eriskay, sixteen miles north of Mingulay. Fr MacDonald worked throughout all the Barra Isles until 1905, when he died from pneumonia at the age of forty-six. Murray’s book is a moving portrait of a man who gave his life to a people struggling to survive in these unforgiving isles in the sea.

Sadly, the Priest’s House is now a complete ruin. The roof blew off during a storm in the winter of 1996. When I'd last seen it, in 2004, the walls, and both gables, were still standing. It is now a pile of rubble, littered with fallen stones, shards of the slate roof, and chimney pots sitting oddly upright on the ground. 

To give you an idea of the destruction, the next photo is of the Priest's House in 2003.

Leaving the ruins behind, we headed across the hillside to the puffin colony. 

Once they got used to our presence, the puffins resumed their daily activities, which included a lot of squawking, kissing, and bringing back beak-fulls of sand eels to feed their pufflings. Puffins are known as Tammie-Norries in Shetland; papageitaucher in Germany (the diving parrots); and frilathios in Spain (the little friars, or, if you’re really hungry, maybe the little fryers). But I always think of them as the smiling birds. Not that they smile with their bright orange, red, and yellow bills. But if you watch people watching puffins, you’ll notice a lot of smiles.

It was a picture perfect day. The azure sky crisscrossed by high contrails. Were were now at the apogee of the cruise, and in the morning would start making our way back to Oban. But we'd have two more islands to visit along the way: Canna of Columba and Mull of the mountains.