The peat-fire flame : folk-tales and traditions of the Highlands & Islands

THE LORE OF KIRK AXD KIRKYARD
Martin Martin, when the latter journeyed through the
Hebrides toward the close of the seventeenth century. The
most fascinating account of this instance of the secondsight
is contained in a letter written by Lord Tarbat in 1699
to Mr Boyle. This letter was forwarded afterwards by
Lord Reay to Samuel Pepys, who was desirous of obtaining
information on " the second-sight of which people were so
persuaded in the Highlands and Islands, that one would be
more laught at for not believing it there than affirming it
elsewhere."
A Story of Clachan Duich, in Kintail,
At the west end of Clachan Duich, the old Church of
Kintail, and within the churchyard, is a slab known in the
Gaelic as the Lcac Chuilcanach. And here is its story, as
told me in Kintail a few years ago.
One of the MacRaes of Inverinate had been murdered in
Strathglas; and immediately a search-party was sent forth
from Kintail to recover the body. When they had found
it and were making for home with it, they chanced to meet
a funeral party on its way with a coffin to the customary
place of interment at Strathglas. The Kintail men, eager
to pick a quarrel such as would have enabled them to avenge
the death of their kinsman, intercepted the funeral party,
and straightway deprived it of the lcac, or stone, that had
been intended for the grave of the deceased man. After a
skirmish, they succeeded in bringing to Clachan Duich both
the corpse of their kinsman and the lcac. The men of
Strathglas—so the story goes—did not dare follow them
over the hills to Kintail ; and to this day the actual stone may
be seen at the old Church of Kintail, within the buryingground
at Clachan Duich.
And this reminds me of a saying in Kintail that, when the
holly-tree growing in the cleft of a rock at Torchuilinn
(Holly Cliff), a couple of hundred yards away from Clachan
Duich, will have split the rock out of which it grows, and
be grown enough to render it useful as trams for a sledge,
a small boat will be able to convey from Kintail all the
MacRaes living there.
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