I was surprised to find that they do not take much interest in their club of some 1, 300 sheep, worked by two shepherds, for elsewhere in the Highlands these club farms are a source of trouble and agitation. In recent years, of course, prices have been very bad, and now that prices are going up interest may be quickened; though there is, I think, a fundamental difficulty that these individualists have never quite got over, and that is an ownership vested in nearly seventy persons. Effective supervision is difficult and the paying off of the initial large debt is never an exciting business. However, I do know of clubs where the debt has been cleared off and where the individual income therefrom is now a very important item in the crofting balance sheet. When this stage is reached, personal interest is roused and communal attention properly concentrated on management. A nebulous ownership struggling against debt and bad prices naturally enough becomes disheartened.

I was anxious to find out the general attitude to the Department of Agriculture over the complete settlement business, and, as far as I could make out, though some grumble over difficulties, on the whole they feel that they got a good and, in some respects, a generous deal. The rent of each holding is round about £4. Peat fuel is close at hand and a main water supply runs through the township. The mainstay is the croft with its produce and cattle, but there is hardly a house where ready cash does not enter by way of sales from tweed, Old Age and Contributory pensions, and army pensions. It is difficult to think of destitution here. And the settlement is considered (locally, at least) one of the best in Skye.

(Later, I heard that a few years ago, in the worst of the depression, many of the crofts experienced considerable hardship if not, indeed, some degree of destitution, but the folk themselves never complained, and no outsider could have guessed their plight. The old Highland pride that kept the head up, clothes clean, and eyes steady! I have heard that Skye men affect to look down on Harris men. Let it be ever so delicately suggested that the same eyes might not suffer by an occasional effort at looking up.)

But however one may argue or discuss the merits of the present settlement, there can be no doubt of the happy contrast in which it stands to the same land under the dominion of the old lairds or chiefs. Less than a century ago Portnalong was cleared of its inhabitants, the houses burned down, and the folk herded to the shore and there placed on two ships—the port of the ships!—that transported them to America. But the ships, I was told, could not carry them all, so those who were left had to build houses for themselves along the barren coast towards Fiskavig. The ships came back and took them away too, and the ruins of their fourteen houses may still be seen.