A HEAVEN-SCENT SOUND OF VISION

rebirth. Lorn Macintyre unlocks some of its many secrets

ISLAY is the magical island of the Hebrides. Even before the boat out

of Kennacraig, Kintyre, enters the sound between Islay and brooding Jura

I seem to be able to scent a dozen distilleries on the breeze. As we

swing into Port Askaig I have a vision of my late father. In his final

years medicine could not help him, but put on a recording of the

glorious Islay Gaelic singer Margrat Duncan and his heart quickened with

delight.

There is something else on Islay to renew the heart. We had not driven

many miles out of Port Askaig when my wife braked to put her binoculars

on the geese in the field. Islay's geese population in winter is at

least three times the human population. We will see and hear a lot more

about these visitors later.

On the reverse of his map of Scotland of 1573 Abraham Ortelius wrote:

''Maxima omnium & nominatissima Ila est, frumenti ferax, & metalli dives

-- The greatest and most renowned is Ila, fertile for grain, and rich in

minerals''. The island is about 20 miles long and 20 broad, with Loch

Indaal and Laggan Bay biting into the land in the west and Loch Gruinart

running a long way in from the north. It lacks spectacular bens like

neighbouring Jura, with the highest peak at 1609 feet, but has 150 lochs

and enough peat bog to keep the whole of Scotland warmed for many years.

The minerals Ortelius referred to are the lead, copper, and silver which

have been mined on Islay.

We stayed with Alasdair and Rachel Whyte and their daughter Emma at

Glenmachrie Farmhouse, four miles from Port Ellen and six miles from

Bowmore, the island's capital. The Gaelic-speaking Whyte family are a

heartening example of Islay regeneration. Alasdair worked in

Bunnahabhain distillery on the island before being transferred to the

northern mainland by Highland Distillers. When he was made redundant the

family returned to their Glenmachrie farm on Islay.

The house has been extended and restored, with en suite facilities and

a library of books on Islay. After a Taste of Scotland dinner using

local produce (probably the best food I have ever had in the Hebrides)

you can have a ceilidh in the sitting-room, with Emma, in her last year

at Bowmore school, playing Islay airs on the accordion and her parents

telling you stories of island life and times.

One of Rachel's stories, which is rapidly achieving the status of a

folk-tale, and will translate nicely into Gaelic, is about the day she

and her family were at a window in Glenmachrie, watching the Prince of

Wales piloting in the plane to the airport that lies adjacent to the

farm. She didn't need to have second sight to know that something was

going to happen.

To help her guests tune into the ancient history of Islay, Rachel

sends them along the coast to Kildalton. There, in a small graveyard,

stands one of our national treasures. The nine-foot-high Kildalton High

Cross is the only surviving high cross in Scotland, carved about AD 800,

probably by a sculptor from Iona, from the local blue stone.

The biblical scene on the front of the cross, which more than a

thousand years of storms have failed to deface, includes the Virgin and

Child, and David and the Lion. The Red Indians rubbed their spines

against sacred stones to renew their energy levels, and Rachel is

convinced that contact with the Kildalton stone transmits the peace and

energy of the early Christians who worshipped under it.

But they also endured violence and death. A legend associated with the

Kildalton Cross claims that when Texa Island was raided by the rapacious

Norsemen, the monks and nuns fled inwards with the treasures of the

monastery and nunnery, leaving the abbot and abbess to plead with the

raiders. The Norsemen tortured them, then departed, leaving the people

of Islay to bury their martyred bodies at the present site of the

Kildalton Cross.

There is another great energy centre on Islay, associated with the

Lordship of the Isles dynasty, who ruled the Atlantic seaboard from the

twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, having taken control from their

Norse overlords. Their base on this loch a few miles west of Port Askaig

was on two islands, Eilean Mor (the big island) and Eilean na Comhairle

(the council island), where a programme of fieldwork and excavation has

been running for five years under the direction of Dr David Caldwell of

the National Museums of Scotland.

You pull yourself out on a ''boat on a rope'' to Eilean Mor. The

chapel, founded in honour of St Finlagan, friend of St Columba, is the

most important building on the island. Wandering about, one has the

sense that this was really a royal palace complex. The carved grave

slabs substantiate the traditional opinion that the wives and children

of the Lords were buried on Eilean Mor, while the Lords themselves were

interred on Iona. On Eilean na Comhairle, where ''14 of the Isles' best

barons'' gathered in council to arrange the affairs of their domain, are

the remains of a dun, the council chamber, and other buildings. Spend an

hour studying the display in the Visitor Centre in the cottage above the

loch, because this is part of the history of Scotland as well as of

Islay. The display of artefacts uncovered on the island includes a harp

peg which resonates with Gaelic history. Mairi Macintyre is one of the

voluntary workers determined to spread the fame of Finlaggan. She

studied history at Edinburgh University, ''but never heard a word about

the Lord of the Isles in a Scottish history course''.

At the battle of Traigh Gruinart in 1598 the army of Sir Lachlan

Maclean of Duart opposed the force of his nephew, Sir James Macdonald,

fighting over the ownership of land in the Rinns of Islay. Lachlan's

force was defeated, and he was killed by an arrow shot from the bow of a

little man called Dubh Shith -- Black Fairy.

Islay, like so many other west coast properties, passed into the

possession of the Campbells on the quicksands of clan disputes. As

Margaret C Storrie points out in Islay: Biography of an Island, Islay

had six Campbell of Cawdor lairds in 112 years, with long periods when

the lairds were minors, and the lands neglected.

Daniel Campbell, shipowner and merchant, proprietor of the Lanarkshire

estate of Shawfield, ''raised himself to . . . great importance, not

only in Glasgow, where for many years he was the most prominent of its

citizens, but also in Westminster, where he had considerable

influence''.

In 1726 ''Great Daniel'' Campbell acquired Islay. It is said that

three-fourths of the #12,000 he paid for the island came directly from

the ratepayers of Glasgow, as recompense for the wrecking of his house

by a Glasgow mob because he had voted for the malt tax.

''Great Daniel'' and the three Shawfield lairds who were to succeed

him improved Islay. Margaret Storrie writes that Walter Frederick

Campbell ''changed the face of Islay. He had reorganised landholdings,

surveyed and laid out new farms and farm buildings, established

villages, improved communications within the island, and spent time and

efforts on improving links to the mainland''. But when the potato blight

struck in the mid-1840s and rents were not forthcoming, the Islay estate

of the Campbells of Shawfield was sequestrated.

Walter Frederick Campbell must have loved his wife Eleanor dearly to

name the new village around Leodamus Bay in the south-east of the island

after her. When I saw Port Ellen from the deck of the paddle-steamer

Waverley on a spring day several years ago it looked as if the tide rose

into the houses on the curving front, and when I had 20 minutes ashore I

passed a community that seemed to be stopped in time, with a poster

warning against warble fly in a window, and a place called the Wee

Freeze. It may not have as much Snowcem lavished on it as other villages

on Islay, but Port Ellen has character, and Gaelic is still spoken in

the streets.

Bowmore, Islay's capital, established in 1768, was the first of the

island's modern villages to be planned, and one of the earliest planned

villages in Scotland. Its main street stretches from the sea up to the

landmark of the circular church, the work of a French architect who

allegedly left out corners from his design so that the devil would have

nowhere to lurk. It has a swimming-pool, its barrelled ceiling

perpetuating its former function as a distillery building.

Above the road out of Bowmore, along the shore of Loch Indaal outside

Brigend, there is a monument on a hill to Iain Og Ile, Young John of

Islay. John Francis Campbell has been lauded as ''the world-famous

father of Celtic folklore studies'', a collector of Gaelic stories.

Beyond the monument through the trees is the white bulk of Islay

House, where Iain Og was never to live as laird of Islay because of the

sequestration of his father. James Morrison of Basildon Park, Berkshire,

purchased Islay in 1853 for almost half a million pounds.

By 1857 Islay was divided into five estates. In 1964 John Granville

Morrison, MP for Wiltshire, was created Lord Margadale of Islay, taking

his title from a favourite sporting area in the remote north-eastern

part of the island. But the Morrisons are out of Islay House, which is

now owned by an American.

My pilgrimage down the Rinns of Islay in search of the great voices of

Gaelic song halts at another model village, Port Charlotte, begun in

1828 and named after Walter Frederick Campbell's mother. After a meal in

the excellent Croft Kitchen we climb the hill to the Museum of Islay

Life in a former church. Here you can see the old manual telephone

exchange which kept Islay folks in touch with one another (in Gaelic, of

course) before automation came. You can also see the juxtaposition of

leisure and labour: a parlour game from Islay House, The Raiders by

Airship to Potsdam, and a lobster creel of hooped hazel wands. Look also

at the equine carpet slippers worn when horses cut the lawns of Islay

House in the days before ride-on motorised mowers.

The Islay Field Centre tells you the controversial story of the Islay

geese. About two-thirds of the Greenland population of 35,000 barnacle

geese winter on Islay. The numbers increased in the 1960s and 1970s

through changed farming practices involving the use of artificial

fertiliser and more sheep producing the short swards attractive to the

geese.

Greenland white-fronted geese winter entirely within western Scotland

and Ireland. The total population increased in 10 years from 15,000 to

30,000, and about 10,000 of them are on Islay. They used to feed on

bogs, but the majority of Islay visitors are now feeding on recently

improved pastures.

David Bellamy's defence of the Islay geese has become one of the

legends of Islay which some of the islanders would rather disown. A

Scottish Natural Heritage scheme now offers all farmers and crofters on

the island cash payments relating to the number of geese that are

feeding on their land, and some farmers are collecting thousands of

pounds annually. If you don't want to participate in the scheme, you can

scare the geese, but they'll soon be back.

You can watch the geese on the RSPB's 4000-acre Gruinart Reserve.

There is plenty of other wildlife on Islay, and you may be fortunate to

see a chough with its red bill and red legs.

We drive down the Rinns towards another model village, Port Nahaven.

It was created as a fishing village, and its whitewashed houses round

the harbour look like holiday cottages. Many of them are owned by locals

who have had to go to the mainland for work, but who come home

faithfully in the holidays.

This is a village sustained on Gaelic song. Margrat Duncan was from

this area. Mary C MacNiven and Donald MacLeod, also Mod gold-medallists,

are still in good voice there. Margrat Duncan soars on the car cassette

as we head back to Glenmachrie Farmhouse for another superb dinner.

There is one more pilgrimage, down the headland of the Oa, to the

tower-like monument erected by the American Red Cross to commemorate two

major disasters. On the night of February 5, 1918, the SS Tuscania,

carrying American troops to Britain, was torpedoed by a German submarine

off Islay, with 266 lives lost. In October of that same year more than

400 soldiers and seamen died when the armed mercantile cruiser Otranto

collided with the steamer Kashmir off Islay in a gale. This is a sombre

place where winds break the waves against treacherous cliffs, and where

Islay men, hardy as their flocks, farm the hilly land.

Why have I not given you a conducted tour of the whisky distilleries

of Islay? Because everyone knows about them, and Jack McLean writes far

more eloquently and authoritatively about them than a teetotaller like

myself.

Islay cheese enhances the reputation of Islay as Ban Righ, Queen of

the Islands. My father wrote a famous poem on Islay cheese, which is

reputed to have aphrodisiac properties. Here is a taster on what happens

when Islay cheese is exported:

An old and shaking Genoese

His pension was collecting,

Ate just one bite of Islay cheese

And now his wife's expecting.

There is an old Gaelic prophecy that says: ''An ruai a threigeas na

duthchasaich Ile beannachd le sith Alba -- when the natives forsake

Islay farewell the peace of Scotland.'' May they be singing their Gaelic

songs -- and may the geese also remain vocal -- for a long time to come.

FACTFILE

* SAYING it: Gaelic speakers on Islay call it eel-uh. English speakers

may use eye-la, as in island, ''with a pleasant pause between syllables

and an upward lilt at the end,'' Margaret Storrie advises.

Getting there: By Cal-Mac ferry from Kennacraig, Kintyre

(inquiries/reservations: 0475 650000). By plane from Glasgow: Loganair

(tel 0345 222111).

Accommodation: Islay has a wide range of accommodation, from bunk beds

to hotels. Rachel Whyte, Glenmachrie Farmhouse, Port Ellen, is on 0496

302560. Ask the helpful Tourist Information Centre at Bowmore (0496

302560) to direct you to the type of accommodation you require.

Eating out: Generous spread of restaurants throughout island. Sample

Kilchoman House, 20 minutes from Bruichladdich. Family-run, local

seafood, venison, vegetarian. Walking on the Oa? Drop into the Old

Granary, Kintra Farm (seasonal).

Recreation: the Machrie Golf Course, three miles north of Port Ellen.

Birdwatching: Gruinart Reserve. Want to inspect the wreck of the

Otranto? Speak to Gus Newman, Islay Dive Centre, on 0496 302441. Too

cold to swim? Enjoy the pool, sauna, and keep-fit facilities in the

MacTaggart Islay and Jura Swimming-pool, Bowmore.

Guidebook: Visitors Handbook, #1.75 plus postage from Tourist

Information Centre, Bowmore. For the sweep of Ban Righ's history,

Margaret C Storrie, Islay: Biography of an Island (copies from the

Museum of Islay Life, Port Charlotte, Islay PA48 7UA).

Islay cheese (the alleged aphrodisiac): sold on the island and

mainland shops. Islay cheese (the poem): in Angus Macintyre's Ceilidh

Collection (Famedram).

Distillery tours: follow your nose.