Six white galleys making down the loch two or three miles away, large and beautiful, like the escort to some fabled queen, knocked most things out of our minds. We blinked our eyes, but the vision remained, stately and slow-moving. In that direction lay ‘the fort of the sons of Uisneach, which is at Loch Etive in Alba’, and is ‘commonly called Bere-gonium’. Down there was the very core of the whole world of the poems of Ossian. Great warriors and beautiful queens and stately halls. Fingal and Darthula and Selma. The galleys were setting towards the Falls of Lora. ‘He hears at last the sound of Lora, and exclaims with joy “Selma is near”.’

Then the mirage effect passed and six swans at no great distance reached still water by the western shore. The illusion as to distance and size had been so complete that the Crew now doubted the swans themselves!

On the thickly wooded slopes above us as we rowed along were a few old Scots firs, rising over the oaks and the birches and the hazels, their twisting arms warm as with ruddy firelight, nursing grey-wrapped bundles that turned out to be herons. Sheep scraped little beds for themselves in the shingle and settled under the shadows of boulders. A flock of curlew rose up and flew away silently. A wood pigeon, pecking among the stones, showed no fear at our near presence. Old Ben Cruachan had still a nightcap above his head—that slowly lifted even as we looked.

We came to a house with a little private stone jetty in front of it, and we felt we might be allowed to tie up here, for it was a small house. So graciously was the permission given that we were almost made to feel we were conferring a favour!

So we now had the day before us and the dinghy safe.

The adventure with the oars helped, too, for in our endeavour to find out if the path through the woods was a right of way, we were sent from one person to another, who told us so many strange things that local lore, often so prosy and tiresome, inspired us to historic hunts.

One old man said that most of the Houses are comparatively new and in more than one instance have been built on what was once crofting ground. For all this land had belonged to Breadalbane, but now it was broken up into small estates, and perhaps the new owners were ‘worse than the old, for in the old days at least you could go anywhere you liked. Parties used to go over to your bay for picnics. No one ever challenged them—except once, and that was in the time of the previous proprietor and he tried to turn off the minister’s wife. But she dared him to his face. “Ha!” she said, “this is just what I have been waiting for. Make a case of it,” she challenged him.’

‘And did he?’