XVI

Glen Etive, where she ‘builded her bridal hold’

We left Oban at 8.20 a.m., round about high water, having been informed by a man on the slipway of the yard in Ardentrive Bay (where we filled up with petrol and oil from the yard’s launch) that high water at Connel Bridge was about an hour and a half after Oban. Though we could hardly be eight miles from Connel, we were not astonished. In the Sound of Iona, the ferryman told us that between the centre of the Sound and inshore by the Bull Hole, a matter of yards, the difference could run to an hour and a half. But it was easy enough to check the information received. In the Sailing Directions: ‘CONST. for finding time of High Slack Water at Connel Falls — 3hr. 6m. L’pool.’ Turning up Brown’s Nautical Almanac, we noted the time of high tide at Liverpool on this particular morning, deducted the 3hr. 6m., and found that the tide should be high and slack under the bridge at 9.41 a.m. We should thus probably enter with the last of the flood and certainly, all going well, were in time for the slack water.

On paper it looked the most intricate piece of navigation we had yet tackled, for we had heard in our time the roar of the flowing or ebbing tide over the rock ledges in the narrow channel spanned by the railway bridge at Connel Ferry. I hesitate to confess that it was the difficulty that attracted us, but I am afraid it must have exerted the major pull, for all our knowledge of the Loch Etive country was pretty well summed up in a few uncertain words of the song of farewell Deirdre sang—the most beautiful of all the women of the Gaels—on leaving Alba (or Albyn, as Scotland was then known). ‘Glen Etive, O Glen Etive, where I builded my bridal hold,’ as the modern translator interprets the simple words of the lovely one herself. Together with other vague historical odds and ends, but certainly with no idea of the astonishing past and present of the whole region.

It was raining slightly when we left Oban and the sky was heavy. There was no flag on the ivied ruin—that ancient centre of the Macdougalls (of whom I have never met a bad one). Passing Maiden Island to port, we opened out the coast and saw Oban’s bathing suburb of sands—it looked attractive even in the rain. There was a real good roll to enliven us and remind us of the open sea. We gave the shore no more than a fair berth and were confused somewhat by our small scale chart, as, on this course, the entrance to Loch Etive is by no means obvious from any distance. We had made up our minds to go inside the island at the mouth, but having been misled by what looked like the channel and turned out to be the disappearing arm of a little bay, we stood off and finally passed the island to starboard and so opened out the entrance properly. To port now was the wide sweep of Lochnell Bay, with its legendary background to the Stone of Destiny. In the leaden-surfaced sea-roll and the rain and the gloom, it would not have been difficult to conjure strange figures out of a dim past. Dunstaffnage itself should be showing soon. So thoughtfully we asked the Crew to read a chapter.