Graveyard of the MacLeods

We had a tasty dinner that night, though I enjoyed most the feeling of utter exhaustion and sunburn melded with utter contentedness. I had a pint of Fraoch’s with dinner. I believe Fraoch is the other Scottish import I’ve spotted several times in America. It was a pretty tasty heather beer, though it couldn’t hold a candle to skull splitter or dark island.

It was my parent’s anniversary, so there were several heartfelt toasts (actually we’ve had toasts every night since we came here, to think of it). After dinner my parents took some alone time, and my brother and I went for pints at the local bar across the street. We had a very enjoyable night talking about friends, politics, psychology, and the like. My brother started with a McEwen’s a fairly tasty light brown beer. I myself had a beer called “Monk’s ale”, a beer as dark as Guinness, but somehow utterly without any flavor. I didn’t much like it. For dessert, we both had a pint of a mediocre dry cider called “Scrumpy Jack’s”. As cider goes, it was definitely drinkable, but not lovely by any means.

But wait! Before I end the story of this day, I forgot something very important. Early in the day, even before the seal boat trip, we were driving on the road when we saw a site that caused us to pull over. What we saw was what appeared to be a very old church, roof gone and walls crumbling with a large graveyard behind it. When we went to explore further, we realized what we took for an old church was actually an indoor section for the honored dead in this large gravesite. The stone marker outside informed us that within this part was buried the bodies of the clan MacLean who had, for 10 generations, served as pipers for the MacLeod chiefs. The stone made no mention of the even more fascinating find within, where we found not one, but four former chiefs of the clan MacLeod were buried, along with several of their sons and daughters. Each of their graves bore their name and how many chiefs had come before them (I think the buried were all between the 40^th chief and the 55^th though some stones were hard to read).

Also in this graveyard, outside with the lesser notable MacLeods, standing about as tall as I do, was an elaborate albeit very worn Celtic cross gravestone. The inscription of this magnificent stone read “here lies the body of [can’t remember] MacLeod, who died at the age of 75, founder of the first Celtic club, San Francisco, Ca., USA.” I thought that was pretty funny.

A small bit away, at the top of a much steeper hill, my father noticed a gaunt stone arising abruptly from the ground – that is, a standing stone. It was clear to all of us that we had to see it up close.

We walked rudely past the sheep grazing by the church to climb the crumbly rocks and sometimes quite steep terrain, and near the top it became very clear that we were, indeed, looking at a standing stone. It wasn’t a pretty thing. In fact, it looked more than a little ugly, bending over backwards more than slightly with a warped, discolored texture. At its base, still out of breath from our climb, we read the plaque at the stone’s base with wide eyes. “Millennium Stone: put here in the year 2000 to commemorate the new millennium”

Needless to say, we began abruptly talking about what a nice view of the surrounding towns and lakes the hill provided for us. From the crest of this hill we could look down and see a huge portion of the small town, at least half a dozen mountains, and three large bodies of water at varying points in the distance. We were definitely disappointed with out faux relic, but writing about it now, I’m still glad we went. Of course we joked about it a lot later, but honestly, if we hadn’t had such high expectations, the climb really would have been worth it for the view alone.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, actually does finish my long and glorious day on the Isle of Skye.