This is not the description of a cruel climate, yet the dark months are here a time of great distress; because the summer can do little more than feed itself, and winter comes with its cold and its scarcity upon families very slenderly provided.

CORIATACHAN IN SKY

The third or fourth day after our arrival at Armidel, brought us an invitation to the isle of Raasay, which lies east of Sky.  It is incredible how soon the account of any event is propagated in these narrow countries by the love of talk, which much leisure produces, and the relief given to the mind in the penury of insular conversation by a new topick.  The arrival of strangers at a place so rarely visited, excites rumour, and quickens curiosity.  I know not whether we touched at any corner, where Fame had not already prepared us a reception.

To gain a commodious passage to Raasay, it was necessary to pass over a large part of Sky.  We were furnished therefore with horses and a guide.  In the Islands there are no roads, nor any marks by which a stranger may find his way.  The horseman has always at his side a native of the place, who, by pursuing game, or tending cattle, or being often employed in messages or conduct, has learned where the ridge of the hill has breadth sufficient to allow a horse and his rider a passage, and where the moss or bog is hard enough to bear them.  The bogs are avoided as toilsome at least, if not unsafe, and therefore the journey is made generally from precipice to precipice; from which if the eye ventures to look down, it sees below a gloomy cavity, whence the rush of water is sometimes heard.

But there seems to be in all this more alarm than danger.  The Highlander walks carefully before, and the horse, accustomed to the ground, follows him with little deviation.  Sometimes the hill is too steep for the horseman to keep his seat, and sometimes the moss is too tremulous to bear the double weight of horse and man.  The rider then dismounts, and all shift as they can.

Journies made in this manner are rather tedious than long.  A very few miles require several hours.  From Armidel we came at night to Coriatachan, a house very pleasantly situated between two brooks, with one of the highest hills of the island behind it.  It is the residence of Mr. Mackinnon, by whom we were treated with very liberal hospitality, among a more numerous and elegant company than it could have been supposed easy to collect.

The hill behind the house we did not climb.  The weather was rough, and the height and steepness discouraged us.  We were told that there is a cairne upon it.  A cairne is a heap of stones thrown upon the grave of one eminent for dignity of birth, or splendour of atchievements.  It is said that by digging, an urn is always found under these cairnes:  they must therefore have been thus piled by a people whose custom was to burn the dead.  To pile stones is, I believe, a northern custom, and to burn the body was the Roman practice; nor do I know when it was that these two acts of sepulture were united.