Moving along this little landscape, knitting it together, giving it some obscure meaning, at first near to the shore, then curving in and up and over a rise, to reappear on the far shoulder to the right, before curving up and over that, to disappear we wondered whither, was a small brown road.

Portnalong we found a very interesting place, for it sums up in itself much of Highland history, certainly of economic history. The houses are all built to the same pattern: stone gables, corrugated iron sides with front-door porch, and roof of grey artificial slate. With rare exceptions they are freshly painted or white-washed, look very well, and fit into the landscape. Inside they are lined with wood, preserved with a light-brown varnish, and those we were in appeared snug and comfortable—more comfortable in their one story than many of those bare windy two-story houses that stand so gauntly by old thatched ruins. We were surprised, however, to find the dwellings all of the same build and obviously fairly new. Had all the old thatched cottages been demolished by their owners in a sudden burst of prosperity? And then I noticed something I had never seen in Skye before, that each cottage had its weaving loom.

As we went up the road in the early evening we heard the klak-klik-klok of the looms—each housed in a timbered hut beside its cottage. And then, like offerings to whatever gods may pass by, we saw here and there a chair by the roadside, unattended, and covered with tweed, stockings, socks, and scarves. There were no tickets of sale. Just the articles in silent offering. If this was Skye then we had never before seen the real island! The potatoes and corn were springing up in small but healthy patches; milch cows were everywhere; and from the absence of sheep around the crofts we deduced —correctly as it happened—the existence of a club sheep farm. Our Gaelic was good enough to know that Portnalong meant the port of the ships, and though the three small boats by the pier might not imply much in the way of sea-fishing, still there must be something in a name. Another significant thing—the Crew had already talked to an elderly woman who had not got one word of English, and even the young married woman from whom we continued to get our milk had clearly to think into English as a foreign tongue, so that instinctively one mended one’s linguistic manners and spoke simply and correctly. As for Mr. Macleod, who had already been of such service to us and with whom we were presently on the friendliest terms, he was not used to a daily exercise of the Sasanach tongue. However, I put my questions to him sitting in the lee of a hen-house he was building, and the mystery of Portnalong was laid bare.

Thirteen years before—1924—sixty-six families, he told me, had come from Harris and Lewis, but mostly from Harris, and settled here under a Board of Agriculture scheme, taking over the existing stock at a reasonable figure. The Board had the crofts fenced off in, roughly, twenty acre lots, with a black wooden hut (now housing the loom) as a temporary home until proper dwellings were built. Money and material were advanced on very favourable terms for the building of these dwellings, and tenants had the option of buying the wooden huts at something like half the original cost. The newcomers had each chosen his croft and settled in, and as far as an outsider may judge was enjoying a decent livelihood. There were certainly no signs of poverty or distress, and if a cynic at Carbost later told me that many of the young fellows were on the dole, well, doubtless they had earned the right, and the cash must have added to the comfort of the township. It certainly in no way interfered with courtesy and kindness, and in this respect, amongst all West Highlanders, it has long been my opinion that the Harris folk take a lot of beating.