Retracing the clergyman’s tracks, we clamber over the verge onto sprawling Gott Bay beach – Tiree’s longest, and a full 300m wide at today’s low tide.
The mirror finish promised by Hutchison endures, and huge flocks of birds swoop towards their own reflections, undeterred by the Nomad’s visual and aural noise.
Thankfully, none tries to nest in us. Washboard ridges are smoothed out with a little speed, although the slimmest layer of standing water prompts gentle fishtailing from both ends as the helm goes light.
The minister’s nag would have calmly plodded through the several burns that traverse the beach, whereas Nomad, spruce and driver alike get drenched by water bombs as if each front wheel has disturbed a landmine. The east end of the beach is dead smooth and firm, and I resist a strong urge to untie all the horses.
Some call Tiree ‘the Hawaii of the north’, but it could equally be Scotland’s Pendine or Daytona. It’s barely a minute from the beach’s terminus to the tiny chapel, built in the 1850s and once home to a happy congregation of 400.
During Hutchison’s visit it was used as a temporary classroom following a schoolhouse fire; now it’s home to artist Matt MacIntyre and his wife Christine, with the ‘machair’ – the wild, coastal meadows – their broad, green driveway on which the sand shakes from our tyres.
Along with friends and family, they give us a warm island welcome, with home baking and tea. Christine attended Sunday school here as a child before the chapel closed around 1970; Matt bought it unseen as a shell to renovate in 1998.
“I cried when I saw the state of it,” he says. “There was sand on the floor, skeletons of hares and sheep and old oars lying around.” Now it’s a cosy cottage-cum-studio with heavenly coastal views.
But we have one final duty to perform, as Hutchison wrote: “There was much excitement when the waving green tips were pushed through the doorway. The tree was carried in like a gigantic baby in the arms of three of the older boys and deposited along the backs of the pews against the wall, where it exhaled a delightfully fresh odour of resinous sap in the stuffy little chamber.”
Matt, his grandson Matthew and I loose the spruce from the Nomad, lift it inside, mount and light it by the window, whose sill is fashioned from one of the very same initial-carved pews.
A centenary tree for treeless Tiree.
