Note 38 — Chapter XIX

In truth, such scenes as these often carried me back in fancy to our own Northern Isles as they must have appeared 1300 years ago, when St Columba came over from Ireland to Scotland in his open canoe, covered with hides, to preach Christianity to the wild heathen tribes of Caledonia; the “painted men” (whether tattooed or merely dyed, matters little), whom he found living in huts, probably more miserable than these, and clothed, not as here in paper-cloth, but in the skins of wolves and wild deer, and possibly wearing, as their most treasured ornament, a wild boar’s tusk, much as these people do. We know that the celebrated monastery on Iona was merely a collection of huts clustered round just such a humble wattled church as the one here described; and having seen these, I can readily accept the tradition which ascribes to St Columba the foundation of three hundred churches, half in Scotland, and the rest in Ireland. For wherever he or his disciples travelled, they established new monasteries on the model of Iona, and these in their turn sent forth teachers, who preached everywhere; and each tribe or clan that accepted the new faith, built for itself a church of wattle-work; and the building was kept up, and the priest was supported by voluntary contributions of the clansmen, paid either in kind or in labour, just as the teachers of a Fijian village are paid to-day. And as in the olden days a very few advanced villages would make a mighty effort to build a stone church, such as the famous Candida Casa of St Ninian in Galloway, or the “White Kirk of Buchan,” so here, with far less reason or comfort, a zealous tribe will (happily in but few instances) exert itself to the utmost to distinguish itself by building a “White Church” of coral-lime—a landmark to be discerned from afar.