The island of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides is one of the gems to be found in cruising Scotland’s west coast. Large enough to provide an attractive natural harbour, its modest height is such that it doesn’t pull heavy downpours out of every passing cloud in those deluges which are prevalent elsewhere among the Caledonian mountains specifically – it seems - to ensure that the Scots are such a cheery bunch.
Eriskay, however, is charming, often sunny, and easy to walk across. And on its west coast is the most enchanting silver strand, a long perfectly-inclined beach facing into the Atlantic, where any cruising visitors to Eriskay – myself included on several occasions – take the opportunity for a spot of what we now know is wild swimming, but we just knew it as cold yet incredibly refreshing, and thirst-making too.
In the bigger scene, it’s more pleasant to think of Eriskay as the setting for Whisky Galore, that cinematic jewel from 1949. Its basically true story is of how the islanders salvaged a cargo of whisky for socially beneficial community purposes when a ship called the SS Politician – no comment needed - was wrecked without loss of life while heading westward through the sound.
Hebridean bliss – the Prince’s Strand on Eriskay
Everything would be fine and dandy if Whiskey Galore is all that Eriskay is noted for. But unfortunately the magnificent beach on its west coast is known as The Prince’s Strand, for it was here that the flamboyant (to use the most polite adjective) Bonnie Prince Charlie – aka Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Royal Pretender - made his first landing in Scotland from the French ship Du Teillay in the initial stages of his Jacobite Rising in 1745.
For those of us who have long since moved in from monarchy as a first choice for government, the story is now one of remote academic interest. For it should have been realised after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 that the Stuart dynasty was a busted flush as far as re-taking the British monarchy was concerned.
Prince Charles’s grandfather King James II, having seen that things were going the wrong way in favour of the Williamite forces at the Boyne, galloped back to his base in Dublin and complained to his hostess that his defeated troops seemed to be racing each other to get off the battlefield. To which his hostess icily replied: “Indeed. And Your Majesty appears to have won the race”.
But the faith of some in Ireland, and those of Irish descent in Europe, was to stay with the Stuart dynasty, and in 1745 it was the thriving Irish merchant community in Nantes - led by Antoine Walsh - which provided the French ship De Teillay to take The Young Pretender to Scotland, first to Eriskay and eventually to the mainland at Glenfinnan.
Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745.
While initially successful in a showy kind of way with action as far south as Derby in England, the rising soon ended back in Scotland in 1746 with the slaughter of the Battle of Culloden, when the government forces enabled their leader to revel in his sobriquet of The Butcher Cumberland. Meanwhile, with Charles’s ragtag army, the military negligence of Scottish highland chiefs and lowland lairds was painfully revealed in ignoring the welfare of their troops before they thought of their own comforts and pre-battle revelry.
At the time, Ireland was still in the grip of famine after the Great Frost of 1739-1741, so there was little enough direct active interest from here, but many exiled Irish men were involved, one of them being a John O’Sullivan who was connected to (indeed perhaps actually was) a noted Cork rebel, John William Sullivan who was to be executed in Cork in 1754.
Another Sullivan of our own time in Dublin, music producer, composer and sound designer David Sullivan (aka Skully) is understandably fascinated by the story of it all, and he has produced this video on the search for the wreck of the Du Teillay for the National Maritime Museum here
In our own fast-moving era, it all now seems a very long time ago, but up in Malahide there might be a glimmer of interest. For on the morning of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, thirteen members of the Talbot family sat down to breakfast in Malahide Castle before riding north for active service in the Jacobite cause, but all thirteen sat down to dinner back in the castle that same night, even though their cause was defeated.
Yet the Talbots not only kept their castle until the line petered out in 1972, but they retained the old religion, albeit by keeping it on a very low profile. That included non-involvement in the rising of Bonnie Prince Charlie. But then, what sane person would want to fight in support of a man apparently named after three sheepdogs?
