Argyll Quotes

“Seek in Glen Massan no emotions of terror and the wild sublime, but a softer sentiment, roused by the forgotten Gaelic bard who sung the sorrows of the sons of Usnach; and in Tarsuinn, Garrachra and Glen Lean, I would restore, in fancy, shepherds and hunters on the grass-grown drove-road and the abandoned hill. The Clyde has drained those glens, not of their waters only, but of men, and melancholy broods among the shadows of Benmore as if it, too, remembered lonefully the unreturning generations.”
― Neil Munro, The Clyde, River and Firth

“The Cailleach was the guardian of a clear cool fountain that welled up from the top of Ben Cruachan. She was charged with the duty of covering it with a slab of stone every evening at sundown, and of removing the lid at daybreak. But one evening, being aweary after driving her goats across Connel, she fell asleep by the side of the well. The fountain overflowed, its waters rushed down the mountain side, the roar of the flood as it broke open an outlet through the Pass of Brander - am Branradh - awoke the Cailleach, but her efforts to stem the torrent were fruitless, it flowed into the plain, where man and beast were drowned in the flood. Thus was formed Loch Awe - Loch Odha, The Cailleach was filled with such horror over the result of her neglect that she turned into stone. There she sits, as already related, among the rocky ruins at the Pass, overlooking the Loch as, on the rocks at Cailleach Point on Mull, she gazes seaward.”
― Katherine Whyte Grant, Myth, Tradition and Story from Western Argyll

“There is a hollow at Achnaba quite round, and one of the shape of a cow, ie such as it makes lying down. I can give you the notion among the people, ie the fairytale. It is that the cow belonged to Cailleach Bheir, and the round form was the cheese mould that she used. A great cow that was, certainly, more than an acre in size, and the cheese mould is very deep, with trees at the bottom scarecely reaching the top.”
― Robert Angus Smith, Loch Etive and the Sons of Uisnach