The Callanish Inn, Linshader Ferry and West Uig Mail Service

Picture credit Tony Jones

The standing stones of Callanish on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides are another of these things (like St Kilda and the Waverley) that are just so ubiquitously well known that I'm not as interested in them as I should be. In fact, of much more interest to me is the modest 19th century house next to the Stones visitor centre: pictured below, it was once the Callanish Inn at the east terminus of a ferry across Loch Roag here.

Picture credit - The Tamed Shrew

According to Bill Lawson's Lewis - the West Coast - in History and Legend, the inn was probably the house mentioned as being built at Callanish in 1827 for Alexander Stewart, the factor (land agent) for Lewis. Though no bigger than any of the surrounding croft houses nowadays, in the 1820s a one and a half storey house like this, rendered and slated with chimney stacks and glazed windows, would have presented a stunning contrast to the surrounding dwellings when the overwhelming majority of the population lived in blackhouses like those pictured below (which the design of the Stones visitor centre to the right of the inn in the photo above consciously evokes in form if not scale):-

Blackhouses on Mingulay in 1905 - picture credit intarch.ac.uk

We have a description of the Callanish Inn in 1850 written by the Rev. George Hely Hutcheson, a sportsman who stayed there for two months while Aline Lodge on Loch Seaforth which he had taken a lease of was being made ready for him:-

It was a queer place that said Callernish Inn, then - the dirtiest little den it was ever my misfortune to locate in. With the exception of the inns in Stornoway, and one small house at Dalbeg, it was the only caravanserai in the Lews. It was an exertion to hold on to the hard, slippery, black horsehair chairs; the beds not inviting; the food, when you arrived without notice, not of the first order.

After some uncomplimentary remarks about the mutton, chicken and cold lobster on offer at the Callanish, he continues:-

Fortunately, we caught plenty of sea-trout. In all Highland inns there are eggs and good preserves, and in this one there was a wonderful servant, who made all those curious compounds called scones, that alone are made in the North, from meal, or barley, or flour, or Heaven knows what. A female was that servant, and she was the only one about the premises that ever seemed to me to do anything. She was both housemaid, parlourmaid, and washerwoman, - nurserymaid and lady's maid, too, for she was sister to the hostess of the inn, who was generally occupied a great part of the year in either producing or nursing babies. Poor, dear Mrs M'Leod!

Picture credit - VisitScotland

You can read the full account, including Hutcheson's amateur attempt to treat one of the landlady's pregnancies while the doctor struggled across the island from Stornoway, here. But, having made the acquaintance of Captain Burnaby, the army officer and fellow field sportsman surveying Lewis for the Ordnance Survey at the time, happily for the inn's reputation he was able to conclude:-

And yet, with all its drawbacks, many is the happy hour I have passed with Burnaby in that small parlour. It was a delightful fishing station. The Grimesta lochs and river were about two miles off, to the mouth of which you rowed up Loch Roag; the Blackwater river about the same distance.

Jolly and carefree as Hutcheson's sporting remeniscences are, it's salutary to recall that the early 1850s were among the grimmest of times for the ordinary people of Lewis. It was just a few years after the potato famine of the late 1840s which had left many crofters so hopelessly in debt that they couldn't pay their rent, were evicted from their holdings and given no choice but to emigrate.   

Ordnance Survey 6 inch map - picture credit National Libraries of Scotland

Note how, on the 1st edition of the OS 6 inch map surveyed in 1849-52 by Hutcheson's friend, Captain Burnaby (above - click to enlarge), the ferry across Loch Roag from the Callanish Inn is marked Aiseag Linshader. Aiseag is the Gaelic word for ferry. It was operated by the inn-keeper who also had a farm attached to the inn - wearing the three hats of inn-keeper, ferryman and farmer used to be a common arrangement.

The Ordnance Survey Name Book records that the ferry fare was a shilling except that someone (Burnaby?) added a pencil note querying whether the shilling was the fare per person or the hire of the whole boat for a crossing, irrespective of the number of passengers or amount of goods carried?

The ferry departed from a jetty in front of the inn. As the picture below shows, there are only vestigial remains of this left but, to judge from the tyres along it, the fact it's kept free of seaweed and the outhaulers (mooring ropes) up the beach, this spot appears to be still in use for embarking in small boats even today.

Google Streetview

At the other side of the ferry there was another landmark which would have stood out in the middle of the 19th century even more than Callanish Inn: Linshader Farm. For a while in recent years, the farmhouse was derelict:-

Linshader House - picture credit - Google Streetview

But within the last ten years (and since the Google Streetview car visited), the house has, despite being a listed building, been demolished although part of the front elevation has been retained as a feature in a new house built beside it. Here it is viewed from across the loch at Callanish:-

Linshader House from Callanish - picture credit Guido

I'm afraid I don't think that works at all. It looks like some kind of derelict factory. Why didn't they just restore the farmhouse? Here's a picture from the architect's website from behind the house looking back across Loch Roag to Callanish: the chimneys of the inn are just visible above right of the tree:-

Looking from Linshader House across Loch Roag to Callanish - picture credit Studio KAP

It's easy to be critical of modern architecture but in one sense the new house follows in tradition in that it presents as stark a contrast to the other houses in its neighbourhood as the original house would have done when it was built in the mid/late 18th century with the crofters' blackhouses around it.

During the first half of the 19th century, the tenants of Linshader Farm were the MacAulay family. They seem to have held the farm since early in the 18th century and therefore appear to be a rare example of a family who held on to a farm through the Clearances and made the transition to commercial farmers from old style tacksmen. ("Tacksman" is an old Scottish word for a tenant but in the Highlands & Islands it has the particular connotation of someone to whom a landowner rented a farm at a relatively modest rent. The tacksman sub-let parts of the farm to small tenants at a higher rent and lived off the difference. Most tacksmen disappeared in the second half of the 18th century as landowners began to take a more commercial attitude to renting their property. Later, the word tacksman came to be applied to the tenant of any farm bigger than a croft.)

In a rental of the estates of the owner of Lewis, the chief of the clan MacKenzie, the Earl of Seaforth, drawn up in 1726 after Seaforth's forfeiture for his involvement in the 1715 Jacobite Rising, Linshader is recorded as let to Angus MacAulay for payment each year of two "muttons" (sheep carcases?), two stones of butter, two firlots of oatmeal and £104:15s:4d Scots money (£9.44 sterling).

Aiseag Linshader from the air. Callanish Inn is the white building bottom right and Linshder Farm is behind the island in the middle of the loch. Picture credit Canmore

The most notorious of the MacAulays of Linshader was Donald known in Gaelic as An Dotair Ruadh, the red haired doctor. Born about 1800, there appears to be a question mark over whether he held any medical qualifications but this didn't prevent him practicing as a doctor by sending his man servant out with pills and medicines. Rather less to his credit was his practice of taking leases of various farms across Lewis and then ruthlessly evicting the small tenants from them. He was also in the habit of picking legal fights with his landlord with a view to extracting financial settlements. So much of a nuisance was MacAulay as tenant that he had to be bought out of his leases by the MacKenzies of Seaforth in order to facilitate their sale of the island to James Matheson in 1844. An Dotair Ruadh died in a private lunatic asylum for the wealthy in Liverpool in 1852 - more information about him here and here.

The next tenant of Linshader Farm was Murdo MacAulay. What (if any) relation he was to An Dotair Ruadh, I don't know but we do know that he hosted a rather unusual church service in March 1845. At the "Disruption" of 1843, the minister of the parish of Uig (in which Callanish and Linshader are situated) and virtually the whole of his congregation left the established Church of Scotland to join the Free Church. The new minister, the Rev. David Watson, was not appointed until 1845 and, upon arrival in his new parish, he preached first at Linshader Farmhouse because the tenant and his wife were the only adherents to the established church left! (In general terms, the crofters joined the Free Church while the gentry and the middle classes - the tenant farmers etc. who formed a tiny minority of the population - remained with the established church.) There's more about Mr Watson, whose tenure as the under employed minister of Uig 1845-56 was an unhappy one, here.

Looking across Loch Roag to Linshader from Callanish - picture credit Alan Huyton

From 1863, we have a description of a holiday in Callanish and Linshader. It comes from this blog which reproduces the diary of Stornoway shop keeper Charles Morrison. The hardware store he founded known locally as "Charlie Morrison's" - picture here - remained on the same site in Bank Street through four generations of the Morrison family before finally closing in 2002. Anyway, in October 1863, Charles and the lady he was courting, Christina Gerrie, with their friends Donald Macrae and Isabella Nicolson, went for a long weekend on the west coast of Lewis. He doesn't explicitly say they stayed at the Callanish Inn but that is the strong likelihood given that Isabella Nicolson's father may have been the tenant there. In the words of the diary (spelling and punctuation as per the original):-

Friday 30^th October
I went along with Donald McRae Christina Gerrie & Isy Nicolson to Callenish. I hired a conveyance from Mrs J. Clark. We left Stornoway at ½ past 5 P.M. and arrived at Callenish at ½ past 8. 

Saturday 31^st October
It rained very heavy in the morning and D. McRae and I went and saw the Druidical Stones about mid day it got fair and Christina went along with us in a boat to Linshader. Donald remained there and Christina and I took a walk we went by Grimersta Garnahine and back to Callenish a distance of about 7 miles. Our drawings for October is £307-13 which is very good.

Sunday 1^st November
[Referring to a 3.75 hours church service uncomfortably seated in a stuffy schoolroom at Breasclete] After we came out I spoke to Alex. McRae Melstay and was introduced to Miss McRae Linshader both were with us the whole evening. I spent a long time with Christina in the sofa.

Monday 2^nd November
Christina, Donald, and I went to the Druidical stones. I counted them 47 in number. We then had a walk the length of the Mill at Breasclet. At 5.o.clock we went to Linshader to tea and spent a very pleasant night there with singing and dancing. It was 10. o.clock before we left.

Tuesday 3^rd November
Christina and I mostly kept the house today it being like rain. In the evening Alexr McKenzie, Newton came afterwards Miss McRae Linshader and we passed a most agreeable night at singing and dancing.

Wednesday 4^th November
I got up at 7 and went to Garnahine to see if there was any conveyance to bring us home there was none. About 1 o’clock there was word that Mrs Gerrie broke her leg and I left at 2 for Stornoway to see as to the truth of it. I walked it in 4 hours when hearing it to be true I hired a conveyance and left alone at 9 P.M. and arrived at Callenish at ½ past 1 A.M. It was very dark all the way going and the horse very stubborn.

Thursday 5^th November
Donald McRae Miss Gerrie and I left at 2 o’clock and arrived here at 5. I had a note from Christina saying that her mother was very poorly.

You can read the full diary entries here and here with commentary here. The inference from the diary is that the tenants of Linshader Farm in the 1860s were called McRae but by the 1880s the tenant was another Ruadh, this time Angus Ruadh MacKenzie pictured below.

Angus Ruadh MacKenzie

According to his great grandson (who by coincidence lives at Linshader today), Angus Ruadh was one of eleven children born in a tiny croft house at Calbost on the east coast of Lewis in the Pairc district. He walked to Stornoway and became a bootmaker. Then he bought a cow and when that broke its leg, Angus Ruadh went into butchery. That business prospered and he eventually secured a contract to supply meat to the Royal Navy. He was also involved in the Stornoway fish trade and was the tenant of Melbost and Reef Farms as well as Linshader, then the biggest farm on the island. It's said that Angus Ruadh had a fast pony such that he could have breakfast at Melbost (just east of Stornoway, where he lived), go to Carloway on the pony, cross Loch Roag to inspect Reef (near Uig on the west coast of Lewis) and Linshader, and be back at Melbost in time for supper!

There are very few farms left on Lewis today because most of them were broken up to create crofts after World War 1. This was usually done in the teeth of opposition from the landlord (now Lord Leverhulme) but Linshader Farm was an exception. When Leverhulme sold Lewis in lots in 1924, Linshader was bought by a sporting syndicate who's main interest was the fishing on the Grimersta River. They had no interest in the property as a farm and actively promoted its division into crofts to the Board of Agriculture for Scotland on the basis that the new crofters might be employed as ghillies. It was a fitting outcome considering the possibility that Donald Macaulay, An Dotair Ruadh, created Linshader as a farm by evicting its crofters around the second quarter of the 19th century.

Linshader divided into crofts

When farms were divided into crofts like this, the redundant farmhouses and steadings were usually either demolished or else just abandoned. This explains a number of ruined farmhouses in the Outer Hebrides such as that at Gress (east coast of Lewis) and the one on Vatersay (south of Barra). But again, Linshader Farmhouse seems to have been an exception and was allocated as the house for Croft No. 4, Linshader.

Back on the other side of the loch, I don't know when the Callanish Inn and the ferry stopped operating but a possibility is that closure coincided with (or was hastened by) the building of the road (now the B8011) from Garynahine to Uig with its bridges over the Black Water and Grimersta Rivers flowing into the head of Loch Roag. Before that, a boat ride across the half mile of water between Callanish and Linshader would very often have been a far easier undertaking than fording these rivers. I don't know exactly when this road and its bridges were built but it seems to have been in the early 1850s because the Ordnance Survey 6 inch map surveyed by Captain Burnaby in 1849-52 marks a "Wooden Bridge (Proposed)" across the Black Water at Garynahine. This was also a time when roads and other public works were being carried out to provide employment for the victims of the recent potato famine. Also, thinking back to Charlie Morrison's diary entry for 31st October 1863 and his and Christina's walk back from Linshader to Callanish via Garynahine, it's hard to imagine the latter hitching up her Victorian skirts to wade across two rivers in spate (remember that he'd recorded that it had rained heavily that morning).

The Grimersta River in spate - picture credit FishPal

By the 1890s, when the second edition of the OS six inch map was surveyed, the map no longer shows the building at Callanish marked as an inn. "Linshader Ferry" is still marked but without a dotted line across the loch suggesting that the location is remembered as one where a ferry used to cross but no longer (think "Stromeferry - No Ferry"). But there is now a "Temperance Hotel" (no alcohol served) at Garynahine suggesting that it has replaced Callanish as the point where a journey from Stornoway to Uig could be broken.

OS 6 inch map, 2nd edition, 1895

But the bridges and road from Garynahine to Uig didn't spell the end of ferry services from Callanish. There was still no road to Earshader on the coast of Lewis opposite Great Bernera as there is today (the B8059) so, in the early 20th century, a ferry started to run from Callanish to Great Bernera and then carried on westwards to Miavaig in West Uig. (I don't know exactly when this service began but it's not marked on an 1895 OS map but is on a 1909 one.)

This boat also carried the mail from the post office at Callanish which was in the building which had been the inn. However the service was fraught with hazard as evidenced by a story in the Stornoway Gazette reporting on a meeting held in West Uig in December 1919. The meeting heard how, that November, the motor launch used, "being far too small and inequal to the difficulties and dangers of [the] passage ... was disabled and cast upon a desert island". Since then, the mail had been carried on a sailing boat and, unsurprisingly, there were occasions when it either arrived at Callanish too late to catch the mail van to Stornoway or couldn't sail at all leading to backlogs in the mail. On one occasion, a motor car had taken some of the mail but had had to leave some due to lack of space. The meeting resolved to make a complaint to the Postmaster General but it's an interesting reflection on the state of transport facilities in 1919 that the PG wasn't asked to provide a mail van to West Uig but merely that:

a serviceable steamer or motor-boat (which can accomplish the journey in all weathers, excepting very tempestuous days) ... be put on the ferry between Callanish and Miavaig; and that it be made a condition that the mail [van] should always wait at Callanish for the arrival of the Miavaig mails.

You can read more about the meeting here. Despite its modest demands, it appears a mail van to Miavaig was provided in 1928 and thereupon the mailboat from Callanish terminated at Great Bernera. That left the doctor who served Bernera and who lived in Miavaig in a bit of a spot, though, because, to get to his patients on the island, he now had to drive all the way to Callanish to catch the mail boat there. Bill Lawson's book contains an extract from Alasdair Alpin MacGregor's The Haunted Isles describing an episode when he accompanied a Dr. Grant on one such mission. Fearing they wouldn't get to Callanish in time for the 9.30am departure of the ferry - an "old and clumsy" craft with a 20HP Kelvin engine - they went up the side road to Linshader in the hope of hailing the ferryman - "old Duncan MacRae" - from there even though the boat no longer made a scheduled call at Linshader. Fortunately for the patient they were successful. The B8059 to Earshader on the Lewis shore opposite Great Bernera was built in the 1930s and this, I assume, brought the end to scheduled sailings from Callanish.

The OS one inch map revised in 1956-57 shows Callanish post office in a different position from the former inn. Callanish Farm - including the farmhouse (i.e. the former inn and post office) and the Stones - belonged to Edinburgh University for a number of years (possibly even since Lord Leverhulme disposed of Lewis in lots in 1923-24, although I don't know) until 1994 when the University transferred the Stones and the farmhouse to a dedicated trust called Urras nan Tursachan which includes Western Isles Council, Scottish Natural Heritage and Historic Environment Scotland amongst its trustees. UnT opened the new visitor centre in 1995 and now rents the old farmhouse and inn beside it as self catering tourist accommodation.

Picture credit - Guido