BY JOHN HUNTER, AUTHOR OF THE SMALL ISLES

OF the four Hebridean islands collectively known as the Small Isles, Rum is the largest and by far the most visually dramatic and foreboding. It is hard not to be over-awed by the sheer size and hostility of the bare mountains and cliff faces that dominate its coastline. Rugged and unfriendly, Rum covers around 40 square miles consisting mostly of volcanic slopes best suited only to upland grazing and deer, with a few patches of habitable green land in the river estuaries.

Cultivation has always been limited to those few isolated coastal glens that reluctantly condescend to agriculture. In the mid 18th century, ploughs were rarely used, and these "little fields on the sea shore", as Rev Dr John Walker described them in 1764, were worked entirely by spade. Balanced against a zenith population of 443 souls at the end of the 18th century, this low level of agriculture implies intense pressure on subsistence and assumes a reliance on alternative resources. It also explains the ubiquity of lazy beds on every conceivable patch of useable soil, still evident on the landscape today.

Throughout history the wilderness nature of the landscape forced successive settlement into those same few areas of good land, either obscuring or eradicating those which went before. The surviving archaeological evidence is commensurately reduced. However, there is one feature of Rum for which settlement and the ability to cultivate was unimportant, and which was a major prehistoric asset – namely "bloodstone", a hard hydrothermal rock which crops out in the mountains (Bloodstone Hill) at the west, and which can be worked in much the same way as flint. Small stone artefacts could (and still can) be produced in a range of colours – cream, dark green and purple. It was a resource exploited from Mesolithic times onwards and may have done much to make Rum important even 10,000 years ago, irrespective of the island’s awkward geography and difficult access by primitive boat.

In later medieval and pre-Clearance times, settlement was confined predominantly to fertile areas, notably around Kinloch to the east, Kilmory at the north, Harris at the south-west, and Papadil at the south-east – four small oases in a volcanic desert – optimising the richer, but limited soils. The presence of hundreds of stone shieling huts scattered throughout the mountains points to a pastoral economy that was obliged to utilise every available source of grazing to fulfil domestic needs. These were the "ancient habits" alluded to by James Macdonald on behalf of the Department of Agriculture, who in 1811 criticised the islanders for failing to absorb a more modern approach to sheep farming. The enforced Clearances which had occurred by 1828, not only resulted in a calamitous exodus of population, but caused most of these shielings to become abandoned: the way of life to which they belonged had become obsolete. By the second half of the 19th century, after a period of unsuccessful sheep farming undertaken on an industrial scale, the island became used as a sporting estate. The great and the good arrived to catch fish and shoot deer, and many of the residual inhabitants became caught up in the estate infrastructure.

Rum did not receive a great deal of attention from early travellers, partly through difficulty of access and partly through the hostile terrain: in 1796 the roads were noted to be "almost in a state of nature".

In 1824, one storm-bound visitor described Rum as "the wildest and most repulsive of all the islands".

Few visitors had anything good to say, key elements of distaste being the weather, local hygiene, and the midges. One recorded story relates to an islander who perpetrated some serious misdemeanour – he was consequently tied naked to the ground on the shore where he was bitten to death by the midges, and from where his groans are said still to be heard at night.

The visitor descriptions are otherwise mostly in keeping with the formulaic travel literature of the time; they have a museological flavour, treating the islanders and their culture as curiosities. However, some accounts offer the benefit of population figures which, together with official census returns, show a population growing through the 18th century, peaking in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, followed by a catastrophic decline after the final Clearances of 1828.

The Limping Pilgrim, written in 1883 by Edwin Waugh, a Lancastrian writer and poet who visited Rum for several months in 1882, cites a poignant eye-witness account of the 1926 Clearances, gleaned from a conversation with a shepherd some half a century after the events. "On that day," he writes, "when the people of the island were carried off in one mass, for ever, from the sea-girt spot where they had been born and bred, and where the bones of their forefathers were laid in the ancient graveyard of Kilmory … the wild outcries of the men, and the heart-breaking wails of the women and their children filled all the air between the mountainous shores of the bay; and that the whole scene was of such a distressful description that he should never be able to forget it to his dying day. But they went away wailing across the stormy sea; and the wild hills of their native isle will see them no more for ever".

In 1888 John Bullough, an extremely wealthy Lancastrian textile machinery manufacturer, bought the island, which he had rented for years from a Campbell owner. He died three years later, bequeathing Rum to his eldest son George, who built the present Kinloch Castle.

The new building, completed in 1897, was on a par with Mar Lodge, the Earl of Fife’s shooting lodge in Aberdeenshire, but took the form of an extensive regency villa with baronial overtones built using Arran sandstone and with elaborate crenellations.

The castle’s maintenance was heavily labour intensive. In Bare Feet And Tackety Boots (1988), islander Archie Cameron, who was a boy at the time, records a permanent outdoor staff of 40-50 on the island, plus about another 30 during the "season". The two populations, islanders and castle staff, were socially separate.

Kinloch Castle was designed as one of Scotland's ultimate shooting lodges and furnished with commensurate opulence. It was built for a wealthy bachelor in his late 20s (and of playboy inclination) and for partying; prominence was given to the male spheres of a galleried living hall, dining room, smoking room and, of course, billiard room. There were also two gun rooms and a business room. The ladies were confined to a drawing room, boudoir and morning room leading into a conservatory.

Although architecturally hardly of the first flight, the great glory and unique feature of Kinloch is the survival of its original contents.

A partially subterranean mausoleum was erected at Harris on the south-west side of the island for Sir George’s father, John Bullough. It was of similar grandeur to the rest of Sir George’s ideas, with a canted neo-classical entrance leading into a colourful, if gaudy, mosaic-lined chamber. The style was not to everyone’s taste: a friend of Lady Monica (George's wife) is reported to have inspired a newspaper report comparing it to lavatories in the London Underground. It was subsequently blown up, possibly as a result of this comment, but not before John Bullough’s body had been removed to a new location. Fragments of mosaic can still be seen scattered around the site and on the surviving back wall against the hillside.

The extravagance of the new mausoleum completely surpassed that of the original and is a stunning epitaph of cultural mismatch. It was constructed in the form of a Doric style temple built of sandstone on a concrete plinth with a pitched roof supported by 18 columns, probably the most bizarre and unexpected landscape feature anywhere in the Scottish islands. Apart from presenting a stark image of the ancient Mediterranean world in a completely incongruous setting, it also stands as a reflection of the rather pretentious nature of the family who had it built.

Although much survives of this flamboyant era, much has also been lost: the gardens are overgrown, many of the outbuildings lie derelict and many items are recorded as having been disposed of in the sea after Sir George’s death, notably his collection of tribal weapons from his world travels, some of which were kept in the gazebo together with military souvenirs. One of his motor cars, a Glasgow-made Albion Shooting Brake, met a similar fate – it can still be seen at low tide languishing on the rocks on the north side of Loch Scresort, chassis intact and the four wheels retaining their spokes and solid rubber tyres after 75 years of twice daily tidal immersion.

John Bullough’s body was encased in a sandstone

table tomb in the new mausoleum, later flanked by Sir George’s and Lady Monica’s pink granite table tombs on their respective deaths. Together with Kinloch Castle, the mausoleum survives as a dominant and somewhat biased testimony to Rum’s history, derived from a single generation of affluence and vulgarity. As a result, the previous 10,000 years of islanders’ struggle against a hostile environment have become visually overwhelmed on the landscape and all but forgotten.

This is an edited extract from The Small Isles by John Hunter, published by Historic Environment Scotland, £25. John Hunter will be talking about the book at Glasgow’s book festival Aye Write! on March 19 at 4.45pm in the Mitchell Library. The Herald and Sunday Herald are media sponsors of Aye Write! www.ayewrite.com