Wishing at the Well of the Queen's Daughter

              Photo copyright Ⓒ  Xander M-B

Different islanders call it by different names and tell different stories about it; the fact is that there is a natural well in the rocks by the sea, and at half-tide or lower, people throw coins into it and wish. It's deep enough for the coins to stay at the bottom even when the tide is high, though in the past, when people were poorer, children used to climb in to get the coins when the visitors had gone.

One Saturday morning I ran into Marg— thin, elegant in old trousers perfectly pressed and a green-blue sweater the color of her eyes — spreading butter on an oatcake. She was in the village to do her shopping; Saturday morning is when the boat brings the most fresh food. Iona, in the village to do her shopping and washing (the community center has a washer and dryer) joined us, and we companionably chatted and drank tea while Marg buttered and ate her oatcakes and Iona waited for her washing to finish. This kind of relaxed, completely unplanned companionship — especially common in winter — is one of my favorite things about the island.

Iona, now 50, grew up there, and Iona came in the 1970s, so they've known each other a long time, but they included me in the companionship. All of us once supported ourselves at our crafts: duck decoys (prized by American hunters), ceramics (beautiful sea colored glazes), writing. We're all single. And we all chose, and love, the island. 

They both knew how to get to the well, but it was too far from my hut for walking the whole way in winter to be fun. So one day Iona  picked me up in her little car. We drove as far as the track to the graveyard where after the burial everyone drinks whisky outside and talks about the person (“When I die, don't buy any liquor, there's plenty in the house,” someone said to me at the one burial I attended). Then we followed another track through the grassy dunes to the right part of the rocks,  and clambered over them to the steps  — the Queen's Stairs or the Giant's Steps, depending upon who's telling it.

The version I like is that after a selkie climbed down them, she put on her sealskin which she'd hidden under the rocks and then — before she returned to the sea — slid into the pool to wash the land off her.

    Photo copyright Ⓒ  Xander M-B

Iona and I sat on a straight rock with a back some people call “the Queen's Throne.” I'd brought some coins, chosen for the selkie, with a dolphin on the back. Of course, we didn't tell each other our wishes. We sat for perhaps twenty minutes without saying anything at all; it's a rare person that I can do that with and feel at ease, but I could with Iona.  It was a grey, cold windy day — the wind whipped our hair and turned our cheeks cold and pink, but it felt right to sit there until we threw in our coins and silently wished.

   Photo copyright Ⓒ  Xander M-B

 I'd brought some whisky, too — good whisky. Six years before, on my first night on the island , my host told me that when Boswell and Johnson came, the islanders offered them whisky in cockle shells, telling them it was an island custom. Boswell believed them.  My hosts told some BBC reporters on the island the story, and, after dinner, served them whisky from cockleshells.

A cockleshell of whisky is not much.

“Don't you think the islanders were pulling Bosewell and Johnson's legs?” I said and his whole face fell. He looked so disappointed — it had clearly been a great night — that I wished I'd held my tongue. 

I thought of that and regretted saying it as I poured whisky into the hot milk and honey I'd also brought (this is a delicious combination, if the whisky is smokey enough), and we agreed that it was indeed delicious. There was still quite a lot of whisky left after the hot milk and honey were gone, and we decided to drink it out of cockle shells.

We walked along the shore, right into the salty wind, laughing and pouring whisky into the shells and then tilting it into our mouths. It was great, better than the hot milk and honey — like drinking the sea. Actually,  we probably WERE drinking the sea, since we picked up the shells from the beach and the air was so windy and wet.

That summer, when I was back in Stonington, Iona emailed me that her wish had come true. And the following January, mine did, too. I had wished to buy a place in America, and while I was back on Coll, my lawyer in Connecticut signed the papers.

Tammy and I went back to the Selkie's Throne to give thanks.

Those aren't our feet: a child on the island kindly went to the site and took these photos for our blog. Thank you, Xander!

Here he is climbing the Queen's stairs — or the Giant's Steps or the Selkie's Way, depending upon who's telling it.

Lost cousins

   © Copyright Tatler
I know my Scottish great-grandmother came from the Highlands or islands, because when her son died at 25, she keened, in Gaelic. By then, only people from the Hebrides and Highlands still spoke Gaelic. So, hoping my ancestors had come from the islands I'd fallen in love with (and seeing those islands was love at first sight — that instant, deep recognition), or the one that became my real home, or even that some of my friends were distant cousins, I started doing ancestor research. 

I took DNA tests and found birth and wedding records on Scotland's People. It's quite a feeling, to see the signatures of people you hope are your ancestors: “hope” because there's no way to know for sure that you have the right person.

Before I found anyone, I learned that one great-great-great-great grandfather's surname came the Isle of Yell, in the Shetlands. Partly because of that, partly because I was getting obsessed with it, I stopped searching: I had island blood — just from the wrong coast. But while I was looking for photographs for this blog in a big box of old family photographs, I found a brochure of Oban, the port from which you get to Coll.  I recognized it even before I saw the 

     Imagine the hills green and the water blue.

name — I've walked those streets and stayed in those hotels and taken the boat through that Sound many times. Getting to Coll means an overnight in Oban — more than one, if the swell is so high the big boat can't tie up on the island, or the clouds are so low that the little plane can't make it over the mountains of Mull. 

The Sound of Mull, on the way to Coll

It was a strange feeling to look at those old photographs of Oban, and think my great-something-grandmother and her children had walked there, too.

And I found a photograph of my great-great grandmother with four of her six children (including one of Libby, who married the Scottish painter David Macgregor) sitting in front of this cottage — 

My great-great-grandmother, Jessie Blair, who married Peter Crichton; her son John (she had another named Blair); and 3 of her daughters. Libby married the painter Douglas MacGregor. My great-grandmother Margaret Crichton was already in America.

Sadly, the place wasn't identified, but I bet it's somewhere else in the West of Scotland. Maybe they stopped in Oban on their way to an island, too.

 I know they lived in Edinburgh, I've been to the house; this cottage isn't it. So, probably, they were on holiday — those look like best clothes, too — maybe where they'd come from originally? Jessie's brother lived in Glasgow.  I can hope they came from an island in the Hebrides.

                                             A little bay on Coll. The water is always clean, and often 

                                         this color.

There were 6 children, and only Margaret went to America, so I have cousins all over Scotland; this isn't just wishful thinking, DNA tests say so. But I'm not going to write and say, “Hi! We're third cousins!” 

Or could I? I got an email yesterday from a cousin in England who'd found me with DNA and Ancestry.com, telling me that my great-great grandmother on that side of the family, the English side, Rachael Saunders, had a child “while working on a farm” and had given him, John Saunders, to an aunt to raise. She asked if I knew any more.

Sadly, as I wrote to her, that side of the family — the Rumble side — specializes in secrets. I told her I was glad to have a new cousin and told what I knew: that Rachel married my great-grandfather, presumably without telling him about her other child. Their son, William E. Rumble (portrait to come, I hope) was taught to read by the village minister in Little Wittenham. 

St.Peter's Church Little Wittenham © Copyright Steve Daniels

He must have gone on to a scholarship somewhere, too, because I have his geography book with his name, 1877, and Stoke Rockford, a town with a good school. He saw an ad in the Times of London for  “free farm land” and set sail for America, from Glasgow (so maybe he met Margaret Crichton in Scotland?). The ship's menu, passenger list and his comments on the other passengers were in the box of family things, too.

That ad turned out to be a hoax, and the letter he wrote to the Times about that was published there.

He stayed poor, but his son,  my grandfather, became a lawyer without going to law school — you could do that in those days if you could pass the bar. And it's thanks to his hard work, success,  and my mother's good investments  that I could buy my land and hut on Coll. And it's thanks to the opportunities he had in America, too — which, like many people's in those days, came at the cost of lost families.

(To be continued if I hear back from the English cousin: third cousin, not that distant.)