The story is that of a feud of uncertain origin between the Macdonalds of Eigg and the Macleods of Skye. ‘Some hundred years ago’, wrote James Wilson, in his Voyages Round the Coasts of Scotland (1841), ‘a few of the McLeods landed in Eigg from Skye, where, having greatly misconducted themselves, the Eiggites strapped them to their own boats, which they sent adrift into the ocean. They were, however, rescued by some clansmen; and soon after, a strong body of the McLeods set sail from Skye, to revenge themselves on Eigg. The natives of the latter island feeling they were not of sufficient force to offer resistance, went and hid themselves (men, women and children) in this secret cave, which is narrow but of great subterranean length, with an exceedingly small entrance. . . . As much of the coast is cavernous, this particular retreat would have been sought for in vain by strangers.’ After pillaging the houses, the Skyemen were going away ‘when the sight of a solitary human being among the cliffs awakened their suspicion and induced them to return. Unfortunately a slight sprinkling of snow had fallen and the footsteps of an individual were traced to the mouth of the cave.’ Whatever preliminary parleying took place there we do not know, but certain it is that a huge fire was set ablaze in the entrance to the cave and thus by ‘one fell smoke’ was the entire population of the island smothered.

But Hugh Miller gives ‘one of the Eigg versions’, according to which ‘it was the McLeod himself who had landed on the island, driven there by a storm. The islanders, at feud with the McLeods at the time, inhospitably rose upon him . . . and in a fray, in which his party had the worse, his back was broken and he was forced off half dead to sea. Several months afterwards, on his partial recovery, he returned, crook-backed and infirm, to wreak his vengeance on the inhabitants, all of whom, warned of his coming by the array of his galleys in the offing, hid themselves in the cave . . .’ to be betrayed by the fatal footsteps in the snow, whereupon ‘the implacable chieftain’ unroofed the houses and piling the debris against the cave set it on fire. ‘And there he stood in front of the blaze, hump-backed and grim, till the wild hollow cry from the rock within had sunk into silence, and there lived not a single islander of Eigg, man, woman or child.’

Of the completeness of the holocaust there can be no doubt. Had any of the original inhabitants been left, they would never have allowed the bodies of their kinsfolk to moulder and rot in the cave, and in fact travellers of a later generation found that the new folk had no island traditions going farther back than their grandfathers. Hugh Miller mentions how the general disposition of the bones shows ‘that the hapless islanders died under the walls in families, each little group separated by a few feet from the others. Here and there the remains of a detached skeleton may be seen, as if some robust islander, restless in his agony, had stalked out into the middle space ere he fell; but the social arrangement is the general one.’