Speed Bonny Bus to Skye: Scotty in Scotland

Welcome back to the adventures of Scotland The Brave in Scotland. Today he speeds on his bonnie tour bus to the Isle of Skye. Along the way Scotty sees lochs and castles and mountains and glens and lots of rain and heather.

If you don’t live in Scotland then the Isle of Skye is perhaps most familiar to you from the famous ballad called The Skye Boat Song . (And perhaps also from the books and show called Outlander. The castle behind Scotty in the pic above is depicted in Outlander.) Scotty’s Guardian learnt this song when in Primary School in New Zealand. He’d always wanted to see the real place.

Getting there: Scotty and his Guardians flew from Perth Australia to London. They saw Stonehenge and Bath, Plymouth, Glastonbury, Cardiff and Ludlow, Chester and Lake Windermere . On reaching Scotland they visited Gretna Green and travelled through the Highlands to Glencoe. (You can catch up with the story by clicking those links.)

The Skye Boat Song is about ‘bonnie’ Prince Charlie Stuart evading the royal troops in 1746. He had raised a rebellion against the king of Great Britain, George II. Charles considered himself ‘born to be king’ because his granddad had been.*

Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing
Onward the sailors cry.
Carry the lad who’s born to be king
Over the sea to Skye.

Loud the wind howls
Loud the waves roar
Thunderclaps rend the air.

Scotty had imagined from the song that Skye was a long way off the mainland and that to sail there meant battling loud waves and roaring wind. But it was just over there, on the other side of the bridge.

Scotty’s bus did not have to board a boat to speed ‘over the sea’ like a rather clumsy bird with lots of wheels to Skye. Instead it simply rolled over the bridge.

Scotty wondered if the famous ballad had perhaps taken a few liberties. You really did have to go by boat or ferry until 1995 when the bridge opened but it isn’t very far. The song is certainly wrong in the next verse (although it is wrong very poetically).

Baffled our foes
Stand by the shore,
Follow they will not dare.

Scotty learnt that the Prince’s foes were not baffled at all and they most certainly dared to follow. They tracked him in hot pursuit all across the Isle of Skye. To keep him hidden, loyal locals moved him from house to house. One such was the house of Captain John MacKinnon. According to family legend, the prince rewarded the Captain with the recipe for Dramburie.

After a month or so, the Prince was smuggled back to the mainland where he hid out until a French ship came to take him away.  All this took place after the Prince’s cause had been crushed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

Many’s the lad fought on that day
Well the claymore did wield.
When the night came, silently lay
Dead on Culloden’s field.

Though the waves leap, soft shall ye sleep,
Ocean’s a royal bed.
Rocked in the deep Flora will keep
Watch by your weary head.

Who was Flora? Flora MacDonald was a young women who, with some companions, sailed the Prince from the mainland to Skye. The Prince was disguised as her maid. Flora got arrested and nearly executed for this but was released after two years. Fans of Outlander will enjoy reading about Flora‘s life because 30 years after her encounter with the Prince, she emigrated to North Carolina and got deeply involved in another rebellion, that of the 13 Colonies against King George III. It looks like the Outlander stories were inspired by Flora’s life.

Scotty was fascinated by the landscape of Skye. Great dark volcanic plugs called the Black Cuillin loom up. There are also rugged granite mountains called Red Cuillin.

The flattish lands between are soggy and covered with moor heather. Between the rain showers, the landscape looks dramatic and sombre. And this was in summer.

There are ruins to be seen too from the days when villages were abandoned. Charles Stuart’s rebellion was a disaster for Scotland and for Skye. The clan system was broken up and Skye became a series of landed estates. Crofters were pushed out of their homes. Then famine in the 1840’s meant many more crofters emigrated. The history of the island is fascinating but much of it is very sad.

Skye Boat Song: if you would like to hear again the famous song, here is a version by Highland Saga. (It’s the original song, not the one used in Outlander.)

Where Will Scotty Go Next in Scotland: In the next posts our Scotland the Brave stays in the Cairngorms mountains, see ducks at Loch Ness and rushes with excitement around the castles of Blair Athol and Edinburgh. Stay tuned.

*An attempt to clarify the history of this: Prince Charles Stuart thought he ought to be king because he was a Stuart. Charles himself was not Scots or English but Italian in that he was born in Rome and died there. His granddad was James Stuart II of England, Ireland and Scotland from 1685 to 1688. The English kicked out James II and replaced him with, of all things, a Dutchman, King William who reigned jointly with his wife Mary. William was then succeeded by his sister in law, Queen Anne. This poor lady had 17 pregnancies but in the end no kids. When she died in 1714, the English grimly ignored the exiled Stuarts and selected Anne’s German cousin George I to be their next king. James II’s son was James Edward Stuart. He attempted to thwart this but his 1715 rebellion was crushed in 6 months. Thirty years later the ‘Bonnie Prince’, the Italian grandson of an English born king, again raised a Scottish rebellion against a German speaking King George of Great Britain. You might want a tot of dramburie after reading all that.

BOOKS with Scotland in them (our Scotty, that is)

Scotty is the star of a very special book called When A Brave Bear Fights Cancer: A Get Well Soon Gift by Carola Schmidt. In the book, Scotty a little bear who gets a bad sickness called cancer. He’s worried and often scared because cancer is scary.  But the doctors and nurses and other patients help him. The book is to help kids feel much more brave when they are getting treatment. It’s available in paperback and Kindle. Look for the brave little bear wearing trews on the cover.

Scotty in books by Mawson

You can also see Scotty in all the books by Mawson. One is called It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In (in that one he delivers the post) and another is She Ran Away From Love (he delivers the post again.) In Dreamy Days and Random Naps you can see him being a king and also a superb guitarist. Don’t miss that one! You can find Mawson’s books on this Link here, and on his Writer-Bear Page on Amazon.This is what the books look like:

You have wandered into Mawson Bear’s web-den. Mawson is the Writer-Bear of It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In  and Dreamy Days and Random Naps and She Ran Away From Love. Mawson’s Guardian is co-creator of When A Brave Bear Fights Cancer, by Carola Schmidt