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.
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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.
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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.
