This was published 6 years ago
Mull, Scotland: A Scottish isle's unique connection to Australia
By Luke Slattery
Tobermory - the capital of Mull.Credit: Shutterstock
After a six-hour drive along squiggly Scottish roads, through showers and squalls and mountains decapitated by cloud, I fall asleep the moment the chunky Caledonia MacBrayne car ferry leaves for Mull.
When I wake, there ahead, gleaming through the gloom, is the spare white lighthouse of Eilean Musdile on its scrag of rock. In an hour or so I'll be walking once again along the rocky shore of Loch Ba, with the bare rump of Ben More rising to the south, the open sea at the loch's mouth to the west, and across that sea, source of today's foul weather, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia: new Scotland.
The story of Mull, much like the story of modern Scotland itself, is a tale of departures. One of the island's most famous sons, the fifth and in many ways most important colonial Governor of New South Wales, was Lachlan Macquarie. He left in 1809, and returned to the old world 12 years later, exhausted by his struggles in the colony. He's buried on Mull, along with his spirited wife, Elizabeth.
I first journeyed to the Inner Hebridean island of Mull three years ago – this is my third visit in as many years – and then the island came to me, as if on a reciprocal visit. I still feel, in some Gothic kind of way, that it asked, like an unquiet ghost, for the telling of a story: the Macquaries' story.
I remember the moment as I sit in my rental car and wait for the ferry's rusty drawbridge to ease onto the pier. I had just returned from Mull. It was early morning in the winter of 2015, an hour or so before dawn, cold and dark. I stirred from a jet-lagged sleep, prodded by a clear and high-toned voice: a woman's voice.
"I paid the boatman with a bag of fresh cherries this morning," the woman said. "I picked them myself from the sloping orchard beside Loch Bà."
What the…?
I woke suddenly, half expecting the owner of the voice to be standing beside me. But she had vanished with my dreams.
I went quietly downstairs and made coffee with her words – the tone a little mournful, yet sensible and matter-of-fact – in my head. Then I went to my keyboard, coffee in hand, and began to listen again as the dawn came on.
I realised soon enough the voice belonged to Elizabeth Macquarie. Mrs Macquarie's famous "chair" is a stone bench crafted from a sandstone outcrop on a promontory with fine views of Sydney Harbour. I had never, naturally, heard her voice, and yet I felt, somehow, that I knew it.
A few days earlier, on Mull, I'd visited the Macquaries' small, stone, slate-roofed mausoleum. Afterwards I'd stolen a peek at their former home nearby. The next day I took a boat to Lachlan's birthplace of Ulva, barely a hundred metres across a narrow channel. And in glorious spring weather I walked the islet alone.
I knew the story of the Macquaries, their journey to Australia, and the pained circumstances of their return – Macquarie sick and dying, his reputation in tatters after a Tory commission of inquiry trashed his building plans and ridiculed his sympathy for the convicts in whom he mostly saw good; or the potential for good.
I'd been thinking, my entire time on Mull, about their lives.
Tragic lives, if we are to judge them by Sophocles' injunction: "Call no man happy until he is dead." Elizabeth remained a widow, and died 11 years after her husband.
I felt these melancholic notes acutely on the island, for it is, despite its rugged beauty, an elegiac kind of place.
Stand on one of its bare hills, look down upon the folds of forest, pasture and gorse tumbling to white-sand beaches hemming the North Atlantic and you will, if you have an ear for such things, catch the strains of a Celtic lament.
Elizabeth Macquarie's story began to take shape, to unspool from her spectral voice with its mysterious incantation about a sloping orchard, a boatman, and a loch named Bà. I resolved, on that morning, to write her story. To write it in my own way.
The telling is behind me now on this damp midsummer day. I no longer hear the voice of "Mrs M", as I call her.
Instead I hear other notes; brighter tones; a quicker rhythm; a lighter tune. A drumbeat. Life.
"Scotland in miniature," the locals of Mull claim. But then they say that on every Hebridean island.
After checking into a converted dairy on a working farm overlooking the rain-dimmed Sound of Mull, I head to the port town of Tobermory. On my first two ghost-hunting visits I'd failed to fully appreciate this crescent of Georgian stone houses flanking the harbour, beautifully preserved and gaily painted, a crest of trees piled up above the town, the pier crowded with lobster creels and muscly fishing boats, and a few sleek timber yachts anchored further out in the Sound. On the harbourfront are shops selling crab claws and ships' chandellery and one signposted Tackle and Books.
I find the pub where I stayed on my first visit. I'd arrived as the crew of an Irish trawler was spinning out a set of reels before disappearing back to sea with their pipes, fiddles and drums. And their laughter.
In the pearly light of a northern summer evening I find a table at Café Fish and order a seafood stew of spoots (razor clams), mussels, haddock, salmon and queenies (tiny scallops). I ask the waiter where the mussels are sourced and he snaps his head towards the harbour. "Out there," is all he says.
In the Hebrides you can enjoy an ocean view and a seafood dinner hauled from those pure cold waters for less than the cost of a pub meal at home. The café has its own fishing boat, and everything it serves is freshly caught.
Off the western tip of Mull lies Ulva, appended to the coast like an afterthought. Macquarie's birthplace is separated by a channel narrow enough for men to cross by riding bulls. Elizabeth Macquarie's story, which eventually became the novel Mrs M, opens here in bright spring weather. But today it's drizzling when I reach the place where I'm to summon the ferry by sliding a panel across a sign, changing the colour from white to red. How I love a low-tech – or no-tech – gizmo.
The boatman, standing tall in his glorified tinny as if it were a ship of the line, apologises for the pervasive reek of otter pee. I learn from him that otters, whose numbers are so plentiful on Mull that road signs warn of their crossing, are wont to regard a warm boat as a kind of public toilet: something that Kenneth Grahame never mentions in Wind in the Willows. At the Ulva boathouse I settle at an outdoor bench with another seafood meal – smoked mackerel pate and Ulva oysters.
Before me is the lovely waterway separating Mull from Ulva, and for a moment I have a view of the upland peaks rolling down to blunt sea cliffs on the Mull's western fringe. It's a view of these cliffs from the other side of Ulva that triggers memories in my Elizabeth of Sydney Harbour's South Head, and another expanse of pure wild ocean.
The history of Mull and Ulva is a song of sad farewells: a lament. The islands' sons and daughters went out into the world, and few returned. These days, in a world of disappearing wild places, the wilds of Mull are that rarest of things: an affordable luxury. Travellers arrive in search of otters and eagles, of seafood spreads and medieval keeps and the brightly painted port town of Tobermory.
When I leave the island on a ferry steaming south I feel as if I'm abandoning something else, detaching from the story that crept up on me one night and held me fast until I had told it in my way. The story of Mrs M, which in truth is more a free imagining of Elizabeth's adventures than a strict reconstruction of them, is at once behind me, and ahead of me. It belongs to others now — to those who chose to read the book.
In its pages they will, of course, find their Mrs M.
When I look back at Mull's retreating sea cliffs – their drama best appreciated from the ocean — I spot a trawler rolling in the swell, wreathed by gulls as it twists and bobs its way back to Tobermory with a catch. And at that moment I want, more than anything else, to return.
Mrs M, by Luke Slattery (Fourth Estate, hbk, $29.99) is out now.
TRIP NOTES
GETTING THERE
FERRY
The most direct route to Mull is the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry service from Oban to Craignure, which runs every few hours in summer and four times a day in winter. A two-hour train journey connects Oban with Glasgow's Queen Street Station.
EAT
Café Fish, at the end of the esplanade at Tobermory, makes the boast: "The only thing frozen are our fishermen." And it's not idle. A dish of Sound of Mull cracked crab claws with salad and homemade bread is the equivalent of 14 Australian dollars and a shellfish platter extravaganza of creel caught langoustines, crab claws, squat lobster tails, mussels, velvet crab, oysters and queenies will set you back $60.
Offering similar maritime fare is Mish Dish, a restaurant attached to the famous Mishnish pup – also on the waterfront. A whole brown crab will separate you from $18, and the pub next door is invitingly cosy.
And while in Mull visit Isle of Mull Cheese just beyond Tobermory for a view of the cheese-making facilities, a stroll around the farm, and a light lunch.
STAY
The Isle of Mull has a number of excellent AirBnb options including the Byre Cottage, Ardnacross, on a working farm overlooking the Sound of Mull.
MORE
Luke Slattery travelled to Mull with assistance from Visit Britain.
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