Читать книгу The Isle of Skye. Graded walks and scrambles throughout Skye, including the Cuillin онлайн

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As Jim Crumley points out in The Heart of Skye, Dalavil, as you find it today, is the product of a motive that bred ‘maximum profit and the minimum inconvenience for an accursed breed of morally corrupt landlords’. Yet, unlike other cleared townships, such as Suisnish and Boreraig, Dalavil was cleared for an altogether different reason, at the time of the Education Acts of 1870–1872. Writer David Craig (On the Crofters’ Trail) records: ‘It was for the children to get their schooling. It was cheaper to clear the crofters than to build a school there. It was quite isolated – there was no road to it, just a path over the hill. It was a very good place for fishing, plenty of mackerel, and ling, and again there was shellfish too, and there was a lot of [sea]weed for their crops, for their potatoes and whatever they were turning’.

Here the families were mostly the MacKinnons, MacGillivrays and Robertsons. As their children grew they looked up at ‘the terraced black drop of Doire na h’Achlais where wild water sheds its veils and jets of spume and wondered, ‘When will it stop? Why does it come in jerks instead of smoothly?’’