Image: Ben Klibreck from Strath Vagastie Road, Photo by Anthony Jeffrey, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2671872
This post is a meditation on landscape, fragile environments, and human nomadic wayfaring.
Timothy Neat’s book on the travelling people and pearl-fishers of the far north of Scotland has been out a while now, and indeed my copy is a de-acquisitioned one from the redoubtable Orkney Library. It’s multi-authored contents – a collection of interviews with both travellers themselves and people like Hamish Henderson, ‘the man with the big box’ (recorder) – provides a vivid sense of a vanished lifestyle and also a record of some of their music.
Aside from frequent early mention of singing round campfires, those interested in song might want to fast-forward to Hamish Henderson’s chapter describing an 1955 odyssey undertaken by himself, Peter Kennedy (a BBC musicologist), Bob Rundle (a Northumbrian piper), and Kennedy’s agrophobic wife Tommy: horrified by the vastness of the Sutherland flow country, she sat in a steamed-up car until the party eventually reached the far north coast and the more open vista of the sea opened up before them.
The description on p.70 of their entry into a large Traveller camp on the Kyle of Tongue is otherworldly: “I might have been in Mongolia, I might have stood there any summer during the last eight thousand years and seen a similar sight”, recalled Henderson.
This being Sunday, there was some resistance to singing songs before the Bible had been read (in Gaelic).
However, eventually songs were sung. Henderson described Essie Stewart – a distant relation of the famous Stewarts of Blairgowrie – singing while accompanying herself on the accordion, a song (in English) with words made by her uncle Brian, remembering Klibreck, Ben Loyal, and ‘the bonnie Kyle of Tongue’ when he was off fighting in Burma during the second world war (p.71).
This song is ‘The Waters of Kylesku’. The melody is a 6/8 bagpipe march tune, and is shared with a Gaelic song, ‘Gad Chuimhneachadh’ (Remembering you). At least one account (Forrest, 2024) suggests the words to the Gaelic love song were written by Donald Alex MacDonald (b.Harris, 1914), a piper, songwriter, and someone who also served in the navy during the second world war.
The tune is attributed to David John Henderson and is described variously on The Traditional Tune Archive as either a waltz or (without the initial upbeat) a pipe march.
The English words don’t have such a clear attribution; it is entirely possible that this was, indeed, a song written by a homesick mid-century soldier, as Essie claimed, a traveller serving in the army. Composing new words to existing tunes was and is how many, many songs form.
I’m giving the words here, because it’s a remarkable example of a landscape being recomposed by a song lyric, and as a songline, it reflects the actual journeys travelling folk made through these northern places.
By Klibreck and Ben Loyal and the bonnie Kyle of Tongue,
That road we often travelled in the days when we were young:
There’s magic and there’s beauty in those hills when passing through
There’s many miles from Lairg to the waters of Kylesku.
Refrain: Of all of bonnie Scotland I dearly love the west.
Its bens and glens in summertime, they surely are the best
For grandeur and for beauty in those hills when passing through
There’s many miles from Melness to the waters of Kylesku.
By Craigie Pool and Loyal and the Coldbackie sands
I’ve thought of them when soldiering in far off foreign lands;
I dreamt I saw the sunset on the hill of Cashel Dhu
In fancy I was wandering by the waters of Kylesku.
There’s beautiful Achfary on the shores of Loch More
Where winter waves are breaking like the seas on Skerray More;
By Laxford and Rhiconich and the bonnie cave of Smoo –
There’s many miles from Durness to the waters of Kylesku.
By Ledmore and Loch Assynt, from Lochinver down to Stoer
You can view the wild Atlantic from its cold and rocky shore:
The clear and sparkling rivers here, where salmon are not few
There’s many miles from Oykel to the waters of Kylesku.
Henderson’s chapter is also interesting on possible links between some of the Gaelic songs possible links with the Ossianic myths (p.73), but mostly, what it commemorates is a now vanished life of tents, outdoor campfire singing and dancing, within the remarkable landscape of the far north. By the time the events in this book were written, of course, the clearances had happened and the older settled populations of these places had been significantly depleted by emigration. The Travellers, therefore, were key in preserving the remaining fragments of that former oral world.
Other song lyrics later in the book include one specifically on fresh-water pearl fishing (p.111, no tune, associated with Alec John Williamson). You can also read Alex John Williamson’s accounts of puirt-a-beul – the practice of singing dance music (e.g. ‘Bog an lochan’, also known by Travellers as ‘The Devil’s Tune’ (p.171), and Calum Mac A Bhi Torrach or ‘Tail Toddle’, p.172). The chapter called ‘Comtemporary Ancestors and the Transmission of Song’ (p.179-195) has some general thoughts about the practices of oral transmission in the Traveller community, as camp-fire entertainment but also as a process of refinement in the mouths and minds of skilled singers, linking the Gaelic Highlands with pre-modern Celtic culture. The final chapter in the book, ‘Foreign Voices and the Written Word’, speculates that the kinds of remote places described which make farming in settled communities extremely tough also make for the kinds of conditions in which nomadic lifestyles were in former times more appropriate (p,216): the land becomes exhausted, and people keep moving.
Pearl-fishing is now illegal, to protect the mussels which were fished almost to the point of extinction. It was a hard life – for the mussels as well as for the people.
Further Reading and Listening
- Alan J Bruford (field recording), ‘Gad Chuimhneachahd/Morag of Dunvegan’The Glendaruel Highlanders/The Mucking of Geordie’s Byre/Steamboat’, Track 61753 on Tobar An Dualchais, accessed 1 April 2026
- Brighde Chaimeul, ‘Bog an Lochan’, from Sunwise (2025) (an album which also has contemporary versions of mouth music), on Spotify, accessed 1 April 2026
- Floraidh Forrest, ‘Tobar an Dualchais: remembering Gad Chuimhneachadh, a Skye ceilidh classic’, West Highland Free Press, 19 July 2024, accessed 1 April 2026
- David Henderson, ‘The Waters of Kylesku’, from Ceol na Fidhle v2 (1988), p.19 on The Traditional Tune Archive, accessed 1 April 2026
- Calum Kennedy, ‘The Waters of Kylesku’ from Calum Kennedy: The King of the Highlands (2004) on Spotify, accessed 1 April 2026
- Calum Kennedy, ‘Gad Chuimhneachadh’ from Songs in Gaelic (2008), on Spotify, accessed 1 April 2026
- Timothy Neat, The Summer Walkers: Travelling People and Pearl-Fishers in the Highlands of Scotland (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1996)
- Alec John Williamson, ‘The man who went to look for a wife’, on AmBaile, from ‘Tales of a Travelling Man’ (1999), accessed 1 April 2026