Sweet drams

‘What seas what shore what grey rocks what water lapping the bow’. So evocative, which seems strange: one would have assumed that Eliot would have been seasick crossing the Channel. Yet he understood the gentle little tides — and also the beauty and the fear, the other-worldliness, the implacable grandeur, of the great waters’ vast dominions. In these islands, throughout the centuries, men have earned their bread from the sea. But it was rarely an easy harvest. The ‘-Mingulay Boat Song’ captures the perils of the quest. ‘When the wind is wild with shouting/And the waves mount ever higher/ Anxious eyes turn ever seaward/ Wives are waiting, since break of day/ To see us home, boys, to Mingulay.’ Not all those boys made it home.

I was thinking of this while drinking Kilchoman whisky, Gaelic Scotland’s latest gift to civilisation. On the island of Islay, is Machir Bay, one of the most beautiful beaches in the United Kingdom.