The Isle of Mull 

    Several years ago I heard about the Isle of Mull from a friend of mine whose cousin owns a castle there. It sounded like a wonderful place to visit, but when I consulted my atlas and found out where Mull was - off the western coast of Scotland in the Inner Hebrides - it seemed too far to go. Like most truly out-of-the-way places, the Isle of Mull is protected by the traveler's inability to imagine getting there. But once you do , your imagination is the first thing that Mull restores. 

    Mull is an ancient island formed by volcanic eruptions that took place sixty million years ago. Successive flows of lava cooled into cliffs and ridges and long, sloping escarpments that rise above the sea, like the prow of a Viking vessel. Buttes pop up like stone souffles on top of broad plateaus. It is difficult to comprehend the complexity of Mull's geological past, but as you drive around the island, noting the wildflowers, the sheep grazing on high hills, and the tender green carpets of grass running down to the sea, one is aware of the fragility and thinness of the covering that gives Mull it's astonishing beauty. 

    On a bright blue day in July, Mull looks like the backdrop for a book of fairy tales with no bad ending: misty mountains, fir-clad glens, rafts of white clouds floating over fields full of foxglove, harebells and heather. Every bend in the road is a new illustration, with fishing boats, white-washed cottages,and brooks rushing beneath stone bridges. But one must continually look beneath the surface of Mull to see what's there. 

    In summer, winter-white children scamper down the stone steps at low tide to play on the beach below the town of Tobermory's sea wall. But last October, during a storm, , when the waves slapped their full weight against the wall, a young fisherman lowering lobster traps from a boat got his foot caught in a rope, was dragged overboard and drowned. The summer before, five boys from the nearby island of Iona capsized in their boat when they were coming home from a party on Mull. Only one of them survived. 

    On an island where boys can be snatched into the sea in an instant, life has a snap-of-the-fingers feeling to it. What has gone before seems more real and palpable than what exists today. . Mull is littered with thousands of years of human history. Standing stones, castle shards and abandoned crofters' cottages lie about like wordless clues. One's imagination is always filling in blanks, looking for the rest of the story.

    Mull casts its net of enchantment over you before you arrive. Minutes before the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry that leaves from the mainland town of Oban docks at Craignure, a castle slides by within swimming distance of the boat. It is fierce and beautiful, squared off and sitting high on a promontory. This is Duart Castle, the l3th-century ancestral home of the Clan Maclean and stories abound of their exploits, honorable and otherwise. 

    One Maclean chieftain decided to do away with his wife by tying her up on a nearby rock and letting the tide take her out to sea. She was saved by a passing fisherman who took her home to her nobleman brother who had her husband killed. Another Maclean chief, decapitated in battle, rode six miles before falling off his horse. A third practiced witchcraft which is why, legend has it, the chapel roof won't stay put. 

    Mull is steeped in legends about murderous clan chieftains, dwarfs who got their revenge, witches who made boats sink, and a l7th century woman who was so wicked that she was buried face down when she died to prevent her soul from going to heaven. 

    It is , of course, perfectly possible for the traveler to take along a novel , curl up in a B & B for a holiday and leave Mull none the wiser about what makes the island tick, you are missing something if you do. You have only to fill up your tank at McDonald's petrol station in Salen to get a tongue-in-cheek earful about their arch-enemies, the Campbell's, or take a bus tour around the western side of the island and hear about the boulder that fell upon Tragedy Cottage and crushed a bride and groom in their bed on their wedding night. They are lying there still. Islanders are never at a loss for a story. Stories are what they bring to the table, as automatically as a chair. 

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    The first thing the visitor has to come to terms with on Mull are the roads. They are nearly all one lane wide, and the person nearest a turnoff place, marked by black-and-white-striped poles, is expected to stop to let the other drive pass. But I was unprepared for the politesse that went along with the practice. On Mull, it is expected that you smile and nod and lift your hand from the steering wheel in acknowledgment of the other person's thoughtfulness. It is a lovely custom, and after a few days of beaming gratefully through the windshield, I felt as if I had done many good deeds and made a lot of new friends whose names I couldn't quite catch. 

    My destination was Glengorm Castle, perched upon the northernmost edge of the island, overlooking the Ardamurchan Peninsula. Built in l863 by James Forsyth, who ruthlessly cleared the land of crofters and then died before he spent a single night there, Glengorm is now owned by an American-born artist, Janet Nelson, who has turned a rich man's ego trip into a stock farm, market garden and bed-and-breakfast with polished wainscoting, crackling fires and flower-filled rooms. At night, when the wind is strong off the ocean, the castle moans like a harp. The next morning, with the light flooding across the sea into your room, you understand why the young Janet Nelson, who never wanted to live in a castle, woke up after spending one night there and decided to stay. 

    The island's principal town of Tobermory. Nestled at the bottom of a hill along a bay, it looks like a village that started out as a proper Scotch Presbyterian idea but got caught up in the middle of a painting competition. Almost every house on the main street is robins' egg blue, pumpkin orange, charcoal with white trim, or another show stopping color. 

    Founded in l788 by the British Society as a fishing colony never got off the ground, Tobermory is a whimsical looking town, with its main street divided in half by a large clock tower donated by the famous Victorian traveler, Isabella Bird, in honor of her sister, who lived on Mull. 

    Tobermory's tiny but excellent Mull Museum, with its displays of local history, including the story of the sunken Spanish galleon still in the bay, is well worth the admission fee. For a few pounds more you can become a museum member and poke through the archives upstairs. Have a bit of lunch at the MacDonald Arms where the local people go to avoid the tourists, drop in on the An Tobar Arts Center on Argyll Terrace, where for a small fee you can collect your e-mail from its computer. Knock on the door of Angus Stewart's gallery on Breadalbane Street and have a chat with the artist. Lean against the seawall and watch the "yachities" on the sound. 

    Shopping in Tobermory is not for the literal-minded. Brown's Ironmongery and Hardware Store also sells whiskey and fishing licenses. The dry cleaners sell Toby jugs and antique cameras. The post office offers basketballs, dolls and ice cream. it is a whimsical town where, according to my guidebook, the local police station keeps a gerbil for a paper shredder. 

    I dropped by to see if the gerbil was still there. "No," said the station manager, Janet Traynor, "he died. When we ran out of regular paper to give me, we gave him faxes, and I think the ink on the fax paper was poisonous." Crime on Mull is all but non-existent, with the exception of the occasional theft of an endangered golden eagle egg from its nest. "People," said Miss Traynor , "either come here and become more like us or they leave." 

    Like all of Mull, Tobermory gives off the aura of dozing contentedly in the late l9th century, when people still used paraffin lamps and went to the bogs to cut peat for heat. If you want to reinforce that illusion, there is no better time to be there than the third week of July during the Highland Games. 

    The games begin with a parade down Tobermory's main street, led by the local clan lairds wearing kilts and brandishing walking sticks. Up the back brae they lead the pipers, followed by the townspeople, to Tobermory's nine-hold golf course which is an Arthurian spectacle of white canvas tents with pennants fluttering, little girls warming up their Highland flings, pipers practicing their pibroches, kilted hammer throwers and caber tossers striding across the field. 

    Highland Games take place all over Scotland in the summer, but there is an innocence to the games on Mull that melts the heart. "Ah there," said the announcer, Ronnie Campbell, whose main job is to keep the contestant's morale high, "let's put our hands together and give them all a hand. That was a fine race, boys, that's what I call a good finish." 

    The high point of the day was when a two year old bound for glory broke away from his mother and ran his own race, curls tossing, kilt swishing and knee socks falling as he flew around the track. The whole crowd got to its feet and gave him a standing ovation. 

    That night at the Mishnish Hotel, l4 year old Fraser MacInnes, who had won the cross-country Chieftains Race that afternoon, was playing the drums with the rest of the musicians. The Lothian and Borders Police Pipe Band who had played their hears out all day were waiting by the bar to play their hearts out all night. The moon was shining through the window. It was hard to leave. 

    The drive south from Tobermory takes you past one ruined castle (Aros Castle, former seat of the powerful Clan Macdonald) and two owner-occupied castles, Torosay and Duart, both of which are open to tourists and lie within walking distance of the Craigure docks. 

    Torosay, built by the same architect who built Glengorm, is another l9th century baronial mansion, with formal gardens that fall in terraced, statue -lined sections to the sea. On the day we visited, the widow of the former owner, Jacquetta Digby James, was in the basemen tea shop, carrying cups to the sink. A cheerful and hospitable woman, she showed us around Torosay which manages to be both grand and friendly, with antler-hung walls and signs that urge the visitor to sit on the furniture and linger as long as you want over their family scrapbooks. 

    A mile or so down the road from Torosay is Duart Castle. Approached by land, its stern lines are softened by sheep moving in drifts across the fields and little cottages that line the roads. But the castle itself, with its thick walls, dark interior courtyard and vast halls hung with ancestral portraits (Sir Fitzroy Maclean, who reclaimed Duart in l9ll and brought it back from ruin, figures prominently on one wall), is an authentic medieval fortress, although burned by the English in the l8th century, after the Jacobite rebellion. 

    Its present occupant, Sir Lachlan Maclean, is a shy and self-deprecating man who takes his job as clan chief seriously, as well he might. There are thousands upon thousands of Maclean's all over the world who look upon Duart as their ancestral home. "I suppose," he said, "it's sort of twee to say this, but when you see Maclean's who have saved up all their lies to come, you want them to find something meaningful."

    Duart commands a prime position on the eastern shore of Mull which in former days enabled its occupants to keep an eye out for approaching enemy vessels (one of which, a Cromwellian warship, lies buried in the silk of the harbor and is being excavated by a team of specialists from St. Andrew's University). And both Torosay and Duart lie along the main road that leads to another, more famous, island off Mull's southernmost tip. 

    Mull is surrounded by a number of smaller islands: Ulva, Inch Kenneth, Gometra, Muck, Rum, Coll and Tiree. Staffa, with its puffins, hexagonal stones and cathedral-like caves that inspired Mendelssohn to write the "Fingal's Cave" overture after a visit, is a 40-minute ferry ride away and should not be missed. But the vast majority of tourists who come to Mull do so only because it is a necessary stepping stone to Iona. 

    The isle of Iona was home to Ireland's second-most-important saint, Columba, who with a small band of followers landed on its shores in A.D. 563 and established a simple monastery there. Before he died, some 30 years later, he had brought both Christianity and literacy to the Scots, founded 60 additional monasteries and gained such a reputation for wisdom and sanctity - legend says that he read a book in the dark by the light streaming from his fingertips --that Iona quickly became a magnet for an endless stream of scholars and pilgrims. 1,400 years later, the charismatic Irish saint is still drawing a crowd. 

    Thousands of visitors come every year to see the crumbled remains of a medieval nunnery, the restored l5th-century abbey and a cemetery where the unsorted remains of princes, clan chiefs, monks and Scottish kings, including , are interred. 

    Iona is only three and a half miles long and one mile wide. With a population of between 60 and 80, it is both charming, with its rows of cottages, flower gardens and meadows facing the sea, and charmed . Mull's mountains attract the rain clouds and protect Iona from harsh east winds. . But it is equally true that Iona protects Mull as well. 

    The siphoning off of visitors en route to Iona at the southern end of Mull makes the shopkeepers in the northern end of Mull grumble. Summer tourists make it possible for the people on Mull to last the winter. But even at the height of the summer season, Tobermory's main street was only pleasantly full, not teeming, mostly with British visitors or yachtsmen in town for a regatta. Looked at another way, however, Iona's popularity has kept Mull unspoiled. 

    Call it St. Columba's gift that in the 2lst century there still remains a place on earth so miraculously untouched and full of light that after several days of seeing things with unaccustomed clarity you wonder whether your eyesight hasn't begun spontaneously to correct itself. 

    There are no movie theatres, internet cafes or video stores on the Isle of Mull, which is not to say that the times are not changing. When the pubs were allowed to stay open past l0 p.m., the traditional celidhs, where people on Mull gathered together in each other's house began to dwindle. More and more English couples are moving to Mull to retire. But an island where small craft pilots have to buzz the local airfield to clear the runway of sheep is not in danger of turning into an urban nightmare anytime soon.