WE are in a west coast village or township,
cut off from all communication with the outer world, without
Steamers, Railways, or even Roads. We grow our own corn, and
produce our beef, our mutton, our butter, our cheese, and our
wool. We do our own carding, our spining, and our weaving. We
marry and are taken in marriage by, and among, our own kith and
kin. In short, we are almost entirely independent of the more
civilized and more favoured south. The few articles we do not
produce tobacco and tea, our local merchant, the only one in a
district about forty square miles in extent, carries on his
back, once a month or so, from the Capital of the Highlands. We
occasionally indulge in a little whisky at Christmas and the New
Year, at our weddings and our balls. We make it too, and we make
it well. The Salmon Fishery Acts are, as yet, not strictly
enforced, and we can occasionally shoot sometimes even in our
gardens and carry home, without fear of serious molestation, the
monarch of the forest. We are not overworked. We live plainly
but well, on fresh fish, potatoes and herring, porridge and
milk, beef and mutton, eggs, butter, and cheese. Modern pickles
and spices are as unknown as they are unnecessary. True, our
houses are built not according to the most modern principles of
architecture. They are, in most cases, built of undressed stone
and moss (coinneach), thatched with turf or divots, generally
covered over with straw or ferns held on by a covering of old
herring nets, straw, and rope, or siaman.
The houses are usually divided into three
apartments one door in the byre end leading to the whole.
Immediately we enter we find ourselves among the cattle. A stone
wall, or sometimes a partition of clay and straw separates the
byre from the kitchen. Another partition, usually of a more
elegant description, separates the latter from the Culaist or
sleeping apartment. In the centre of the kitchen a pavement of
three or four feet in diameter is laid, slightly raised towards
the middle, on which is placed the peat fire. The smoke, by a
kind of instinct peculiar to peat smoke, finds its way to a hole
in the roof called the falas, and makes its escape. The fire in
the centre of the room was almost a necessity of the good old
Ceilidh days. When the people congregated
in the evening, the circle could be extended to the full
capacity of the room, and occasionally it became necessary to
have a circle within a circle. A few extra peats on the fire
would, at any time, by the additional heat produced, cause an
extension of the circle, and at the same time send its warming
influences to the utmost recesses of the apartment. The circle
became extended by merely pushing back the seats, and this
arrangement became absolutely necessary in the houses which were
most celebrated as the great Ceilidh centres of the district.
The Ceilidh rendezvous is the house in which
all the Folk-lore of the country, all the old sgeulaclulan or
stories, the ancient poetry known to the bards or
Seanachaidfiean, and old riddles and proverbs are recited from
night to night by old and young. All who took an interest in
such questions congregated in the evening in these centres of
song and story. They were also great centres of local industry.
Net-making the staple occupation, at which the younger members
of the circle had to take a spell in turn. Five or six nets were
attached in different corners of the apartment to a chair, a
bedstead or post set up for the purpose, and an equal number of
young gossippers nimbly plied their fingers at the rate of a
pound of yarn a day. Thus, a large number of nets were turned
out during the winter months, the proceeds of which, when the
nets were not made for the members of the household, went to pay
for tobacco and other luxuries for the older and most
necessitous members of the circle.
With these preliminary remarks we shall now
introduce the readers of the Celtic Magazine to the most famous
Ceilidh house in the district, and ask them to follow us from
month to month while we introduce the principal members of the
celebrated circle.
Chapter 1 |
Chapter 2 |
Chapter 3
