Sunwise in Tiree

A day ago , by Richard Lutz

RICHARD LUTZ sails west to an island awash with unsaintly saints and more questions than answers

From swerve of shore to bend of bay, you head to a ruin.

Specifically, this ruin:

It’s not much. Scratchings and hints on the green earth. An east facing crumbling wall, scattered stonework, some vague circular marks.

It’s St Patrick’s Chapel on the Scottish island of Tiree and, some 1500 years ago, it was built for unruly Irish monks as a lonely retreat to contemplate their god, their very unholy misdeeds and the sea.

Today, it’s a trek across the graceful curve of Traighe Balephuil beach and a rumbly walk across a shore track to find the old remains.

The sea glitters. A fresh breeze cools the air.

Above- the large empty hill of Ceann a’ Mhara filled with the sound of nesting gulls and fulmars. Below- the stones and bones of unmoved history.

The old ruins, also called Tempeall Pharaig, contain two ancient crosses cut into boulders rising from the earth like jaggy teeth. The circular marks may reveal where the early Christian monks lived in beehive huts. There’s an outline of a fishpool chipped from the rocky shore. But no one is sure of its date.

Actually, no one is sure about alot of Tiree history. Which makes it very alluring on this bright brisk spring day when the Highland mountains frame the eastern horizon.

It may have all started in the early Christian era when St Brendan the Navigator mythically roamed the North Atlantic. Here he is on the left in a titchy boat looking a bit apprehensive:

He’s best remembered as the 6thc Irish adventurer who may (repeat…may) have landed in North America before the Vikings or Columbus and without proper visa accreditation. No one knows for sure.

At some time, it seems, he made his way to the Hebridean Isles off Scotland and accounts say he landed (maybe) in about 530AD (ish), at a spot on Tiree called Mag Luinge. That’s all we know. Or, rather, all we know about wobbly facts, faded myth and stories built on stories.

A monastery for wayward monks was later built on the site where Brendan landed. One fact, old and solid as stone, is The Maclean Cross, a few miles up the coast from St Patrick’s Chapel:

It supposedly marks the spot where St Brendan the Navigator first landed and where a more lasting monastery was eventually built. Later, abbots ordered St Patrick’s Chapel to be constructed at the end of the crescent shaped beach to send away naughty brethren to contemplate their sins.

Over the centuries, as it fell to ruin, it was rebuilt as a medieval retreat. And then as it fell again, St Patrick’s chapel, tucked at the end of a finger of land, gained mythic powers.

Local doctor John Holliday recounts how a crofter described the powers of the chapel’s well. ‘Whatever that was wrong with you,’ the islander explained, ‘if you went round Teampall Pharaig sunwise and took a taste of the water three times in the name of the Lord, you would be cured.’

Just one more story embedded in the shorelines of Tiree, off the coast of sunwise Scotland, west of hard facts, north of somewhere else.

additional pix: Rob Farrow, Michael Earnshaw, F. Leask