Hebridean Healers - Crois an Ollaimh - Mull

It is always depressing to leave Iona. I needed something to cheer me up, so as we drove east across the Ross, I looked at my tattered OS Landranger Map 48 for inspiration. There were several inspiring notes I’d made on it over the years. One read: ‘Quarry used in Skerryvore’. The note pointed to Camus Tuath, a bay on the Ross between Iona and Bunessen, where the granite used in the Skerryvore light was quarried. To get to it required a two-mile round-trip walk. That would take at least two hours. We had a ferry to catch, so the quarry had to wait another time.

Another note on the map read: ‘Ardtun—leaf beds and like Giant’s Causeway.’ It is at Ardtun that you’ll find fascinating basalt pillars, exposed lava tubes, and fossil beds. But, like the quarry at Camus Tuath, seeing Ardtun would require a couple of hours. So far, my search for easy inspiration has failed. Then, as we neared the head of Loch Scridan, I noticed a two-word note on the map that read: ‘To Beatons’. An arrow next to the note pointed to one of those not very informative but still enticing, one-word notations the OS uses to mark historic sites. The word, printed in an ancient-looking Celtic font, was ‘Cross.’ 

And so we parked at a layby near Pennycross Farm (NM 5065 2619). That placed us 200 feet south of the cross. It was a difficult 200 feet. At the start, I had to jump across the slow-moving waters of Allt Ruaidh. From there, it was a slow walk across rocky terrain hidden under grass and heather. The cross was enclosed by a spiked iron fence, like those that guard the tombstones of the well-to-do or famous. JP MacLean describes the cross in History of the Island of Mull (1923):

This cross is rudely cut out of a block of slate, not belonging to the island. It is fixed by a well-cut mortice into a square block of Gribun sandstone, which rests on a pyramidal pile of basalt blocks from the immediate vicinity. There is a tradition that it was erected to the memory of one of the famous Beatons, that family being noted for success in the healing art. This belief probably owes its origin to the letters on the stone.

The cross, which may date to the eighth century, is named on some maps as Crois an Ollaimh, the cross of the doctor and is made of Moine granulite, not slate. Due to weathering and the continual erosion of a crusty, grey lichen, the letters on it were barely visible. A drawing in TS Muir’s Ecclesiological Notes on some of the Islands of Scotland records the inscription as 'GMB 1582 DMB.' According to the RCAHMS Inventory (Argyll Vol. 3, Item 319): ‘It seems probable that the initials stand for Gille-Coluim [Malcolm] MacBethadh and his son Domnall, members of the Beaton family who, before the 17th century, used the surnames MacBethadh and Mac an Ollaimh indiscriminately.’

As for why a memorial to the Beatons was placed at Pennycross, a half mile from Pennygael, a return to the well of information in MacLean’s History of the Island of Mull reveals the following:

John, the most celebrated of that race (the Beatons) lived at Pennyghael in Mull. Near his residence he had a botanical garden where he raised many different kinds of plants, with which he experimented, using such tests as should indicate what effect would result when administered for various diseases. It is probable that to this garden may be traced many exotic plants that long continued to be used for curative and other purposes. 

The Beatons had the farm of Pennycross, and their home was on the old road near NM 50715 26057, some 500 feet southeast of where I’d parked. (Neither the house nor the road exists today.) The Beatons were famed for the use of healing plants. Their half-acre botanical/physic garden was sited within a three-sided enclosure shown on the 1880 OS Map centred at NM 5073 2610. Their vast herbal pharmacopoeia included wormwood for intestinal parasites, fennel for vision difficulties, foxglove for heart problems, rosemary for improving memory, St John’s Wort for depression, and thyme for respiratory diseases.

The Beaton name evolved from MacBethadh/MacBetha/MacBeth. They were physicians to the Lords of the Isles for over three centuries, and to quote from the book Hebridean Healers: The Beatons of Mull: ‘They were well educated at leading European medical universities and combined this knowledge with their herbal lore to effect successful cures, which earned great renown.’ In addition to Mull, there were Beaton doctors on Islay, Bute, Colonsay, Uist, and Skye. TS Muir mentioned the various branches of the Beatons in Characteristics of Old Church Architecture in the Mainland & Western Islands of Scotland (1861). His description includes the following about Neil Beaton of Skye.

Of this lot of Beatons, Neil seems to have been the most celebrated, and so prompt and potent were his cures, particularly of "Running-sores, grievous Headaches, Coughs, and pains in the Belly," that patients flocked to him from all places, ever so distant, for the benefit of his vegetable juices, extracted from "Plants and Roots after a Chymical way, peculiar to himself" or rather, as was quietly surmised, to the devil, from whom, for a consideration, payable at a certain date, he had been favoured with the Recipe.

It was not only the Lords of the Isles that employed the Beatons. A Patrick MacBeth was physician to Robert the Bruce, and Beaton doctors attended the Kings of Scotland from The Bruce on through the reign of James VI, James VII/II, and Charles I.

The Beatons became firmly established on Mull when MacLean of Duart awarded the farm of Pennycross to Andrew Beaton, the first Ollamhan Muileach, in 1572. Their Pennycross physic garden was probably established at the same time. Sixteen years later, Andrew was succeeded as Ollamhan Muileach by his son Malcolm, whose initials are on the cross. In 1588, Malcolm was aboard the Spanish Galleon San Juan de Sicilia (sometimes referred to as the Florencia or Florida) when it was blown up in Tobermory Bay. He was one of the few survivors of this bit of sabotage and was “blowen on the shoaare with the upper decke”.

Malcolm’s son Domhall succeeded his father as Ollamhan Muileach. The next in line was Domhall’s son John. Born in 1594, John was the fourth and last Ollamhan Muileach. When he died in 1657, John was buried on Iona, where an elaborate tombstone was erected by his grandson Donald in 1674. The Beatons were mostly gone from Pennycross when MacLean repossessed the farm in 1719.

My wife was patiently waiting in the car, so I did not linger at the cross. Even though it was a short visit, my post-Iona depression had lifted. The Beatons cured me: I’d not ingested any St John’s Wort, but I had inhaled the sweet sea air of Port Bìrlinne. As the name implies, this was once a landing place for those crossing the loch to Tiroran or arriving on the Ross to seek help from An t-Ollamhan Muileach. Birlinns no longer ply these waters, and although it was a good day for sailing, no boats were to be seen. It was also a good day for walking. A sea breeze kept the midges away and masked the sound of the occasional car passing on the highway.

* * *

These days, a walk to Crois an Ollaimh is much easier; a plank bridge crosses the stream, and a path leads to the cross. But I am glad it was a bit of a struggle when I went there on a grey day in 1992. It was my early years of island trekking, and that short but challenging walk inspired many more to come. For the history of the Beatons and their physic garden, see Hebridean Healers: The Beatons of Mull, by Christine Leach, Andrea Cameron, Miek Zwamborn, and Elizabeth Carter (Origin, 2024).  

Hylle-fjell—Hallival—The Mountain of Ledges—Rùm

In May I will be staying the better part of a week on Rùm. Over the past decade, I've made several day trips to the island, but it's been 25 years since I've stayed there. My wife and I spent a week in 1997 and again in 2000. On both occasions, we had accommodations on the top floor of Kinloch Castle. Those rooms have not been used for 20 years, as the castle is fenced off and mouldering away. In going through my journals from back then, I realised I'd not written much about one of the walks I made in 2000.

* * *

It was June of 2000, and my wife and I had walked the five miles to Kilmory at the north tip of Rùm. In the Kilmory burial ground lies an ancient, cross-carved pillar stone I wanted to see. There is also another stone, one that marks the grave of the Matheson children. Murdoch Matheson had been the Kilmory shepherd from 1855 to 1875. As of September 7, 1873, the Mathesons had eleven children. Over the next three days, they lost five to diphtheria. Grief-stricken, they emigrated to New Zealand. The children’s tombstone, inscribed with all those young names, is a grim reminder of island life a century ago. 

But, when we reached Kilmory, we were told we could not enter the burial ground. A hind was about to give birth, and a battalion of walkie-talkie and binocular-toting naturalists monitored the blessed event as if it was a virgin birth. There was still a lot of daylight left, so when we returned to the cross-island track, I abandoned my wife (something she’s used to). If I hurried, there was just enough time before dark to get high. The mantled peak of Hallival was calling.

Getting to Hallival required climbing into Corrie Dubh, the Dark Corrie. It was an easy walk at first, along the banks of Allt Slugan a’ Choilich to the dam and powerhouse that supply electricity to the castle. Then the path left the forest, which was good and bad—I was baking in the sun, but there were no midges. Over the next half mile, the path climbed 600 feet to another dam. There was no rest for the weary on this damn path. It insisted on continuing its relentless ascent to yet another dam at the 900-foot level.

I was now in Corrie Dubh, where the headwaters of Allt Slugan a’ Choilich come together. The terrain near here was the site of some botanical skulduggery a half-century before. It was where Professor John Heslop Harrison of Newcastle University was accused of planting Carex Bicolor, a species of sedge never before seen in Britain.

The professor wanted to prove a theory that some plants and insects survived the last Ice Age in Britain. To do this required two things. The first was to go to a place that had remained ice-free throughout the last Ice Age. Mountain tops above ice fields are known as nunataks; Hallival is one example. The second thing Harrison needed to do was find species in such a location that did not exist nearby, meaning they could not have naturally spread there after the ice receded. One such candidate was Carex Bicolor, a perennial sedge that grows to a height of five inches and is not native to Britain.

The Professor was fortunate to be allowed access to Rùm. This was during the 1940s and 50s, when it was known as The Forbidden Island, and you needed permission to land. The professor was acquainted with the Bulloughs, who allowed him to lodge in the castle. That made Rùm, in a sense, his own private island for botanical research.

Karl Sabbagh’s A Rum Affair, published in 1999, tells the story of John Raven, a classical scholar and amateur botanist, who investigated the suspected planting of alien species on Rùm (and elsewhere) by Professor Harrison. As the following extract from John Raven by His Friends (privately published after his death) shows, Raven was the ideal person to investigate the allegations.

Anyone who boatanized with John on mountains soon came to realise that he had an instinct for a ‘good’ site and would often go unerringly to the place where the rare plant was going. This was partly because he used, almost subconsciously, signs of ‘indicator species’—commoner mountain plants which were sufficiently choosy about where they grew to mark off the site as worth searching for the real rarities—but also, one had to admit, he seemed to have an inexplicable skill in prediction. When this was combined, as it so often was, with his capacity for very painstaking detective work, the combination was very powerful indeed.

John Raven passed away in 1980. His obituary included the following: In 1954 he was at the centre of a curious episode. A reputable biologist had recorded finding, on the isle of Rum, several plants not previously found in Britain. The botanical world was surprised, not to say suspicious, John went to investigate. His report was deposited in the Trinity College Library and has never been published.

To quote from A Rum Affair: At the heart of [Raven’s] report was an accusation that Professor John Heslop Harrison of Newcastle University had, at some time in the 1940s, transported alien plants to the island of Rum and planted them himself in the soil. He had then, Raven alleged, “discovered” the plants and claimed that they were indigenous to the area and that he was the first to come across them.

Raven would go on to co-author the classic Mountain Flowers, published by Collins in 1956, and to write A Botanist’s Garden in 1971. Although A Rum Affair was published the year before my walk, I had not read it. And so, as I passed through Corrie Dubh, I had no idea it played a starring role in the affair. Even if I had known, I was exhausted and would not have gone ‘off piste’ to search for where a professor surreptitiously planted sedges. I was intent on summiting Hallival, the mountain of ledges.

From the head of Corie Dubh, the path ascended another 600 feet to Bealach Bairc-mheall. Climbers have a choice here. A turn to the right led to the summit of Barkeval, while a left turn was the start of the Cuillin Traverse, a ten-hour excursion starting with Hallival that bags seven peaks. The summit of Hallival was a mile away, and the final ascent required climbing a giant staircase of gabbro ledges.

Many of the ledges were carpeted with grassy tufts known as shearwater greens, fertilised by the copious quantity of guano produced by the Manx shearwaters that nest there.

The rocky mantle was a vertical maze, a puzzle that needed to be solved to reach the top. The sun had been relentless all day, and after hiking over a dozen miles, I was baked, burned, and running out of steam. But the exhaustion evaporated as, with a shout of joy, I boosted myself over the final ledge. The triangular plateau looked like an altar to the sky. The views were spectacular and vastly different from 250 centuries ago when the summit was an island in a sea of ice. As all that ice receded, it left behind something beautiful.

To the north, the forest enveloping the castle created a green oasis at the heart of Kinloch Glen, backed by the Cuillins of Skye on the far horizon. 

The view south was as inspiring, where the knife ridge to Askival tempted further wanderings. To attain its summit would require dropping 400 feet to the saddle, then ascending 700 feet to Askival’s airy top. Another temptation was to spend the night on the ledges of Hallival to witness the shearwaters’ return. I had to resist both. It was getting late, and the wife would worry if I was not back before dark.

* * *

Later that evening, Clive Hollingworth, the castle manager, offered us a tour. One stop was Monica Bullough’s ornate bathroom, with its over-the-top shower: spigots and sprays that can reach every hidden nook and cranny. It surpassed any of the ‘Rainforest Showers’ in upscale hotels. Then, after a visit to the Main Hall, Clive led us to a closet that housed the orchestrion. Built in 1900, it was produced by Imhof and Mukle, a company based in the Black Forest. It was one of the largest orchestrions made and was driven by a wooden roll with eighty-eight tracks for notes and twenty-two tracks for organ registers and percussion. The sound blasted from 264 pipes, with registers that produced clarinet, piccolo, flute, trumpet, and trombone sounds. The bellows were powered up, which blew air into an intricate mechanism that ran the keys and percussion controls. The resulting symphony was astonishing. It echoed through the Great Hall, echoing the extravagant sounds of a privileged past.

The next stop was the ballroom, which Clive called the ‘orgy room.’ It had worn silk wall hangings that once provided an erotic ambience, amplified by a constellation of stars on the ceiling. When the lights were dimmed, they gave the party-goers the feeling they were out under the stars. It was the perfect place for free love. The windows were high on the walls so no one could spy on the merrymakers. And if those merry-makers were thirsty, a revolving bar prevented the help from seeing the goings-on. If the Rùmachs want to revitalise their economy, they should consider restoring the orgy room and offering it out for nightly rentals.