The herring nets, set to dry on the roadside fences, met us about four miles from Mallaig. I have heard Mallaig spoken of as an end dump. And it can look uninviting enough on a wet day, and such architecture as it has may not be exactly a tribute to its situation; but still it deals with the sea and deep-sea fishing boats and is a depot—a famed name—for fishermen in these western seas. They can ‘make for Mallaig’. Which should be enough for anyone. The miles of net guided us all the way in till we saw the town down below, the water breaking green round the rock off the harbour entrance, a few small yachts at anchor in the basin, in front of them two drifters with mizzens set, the Lochmor at the pier, a train engine puffing, a crane cranking, and a great crowd of screaming gulls. There was something very bright about it. Our friends were delighted with this sudden evidence of life and work at the end of so lovely a road. A man was packing mackerel in boxes with ice so busily that he had no time to speak to anyone; clearly the mood of one avid to make money out of a not very hopeful speculation. There was a gutting machine that could gut and wash and split over sixty herring a minute for kippering; a very neat piece of mechanism, though I prefer the product smoked rather than dyed in vats. Then I ran into the engineer whom I had met in Eigg and he took me to a marine shop, where I got a supply of splitpins, sparking plugs, and two holding-down bolts. Thereupon we adjourned to where many seamen were gathered together, and I discovered the other side to the bright picture.

For the herring fishing was a failure. At this time of the year there should have been fifty or sixty drifters lying out there instead of two. Mallaig is an all-the-year depot for deep-sea fishing.

You could feel this lack of life, this concern with a box or two of mackerel, where there should have been a throb of life round gutting stations overflowing from good shots of herring, everyone working at high pressure with the excitement of taking part in a magnificent game of chance. In the old days of the sailing boats, what a nimble-footed throng, what jostling and rustle of women gutters’ oilskins, what gaiety!

‘Aye, and there were the local seasons, too. Think of the Tiree fishing bank itself, for cod and ling. The East Coast boats used to go through there, even from small places in Caithness. They had little huts and lived there while the season lasted, catching their fish, splitting them, and drying them on the rocks. Nothing of that now. They say the trawlers have cleaned the banks out.’

‘They say anything, but dammit if the West Coaster had any spunk left in him, he wouldn’t go blaming the trawler. The only thing he’s good at is getting the dole, and he’s a dab hand at that.’