Glenmore, Isle of Skye

We arrived on Skye late in he afternoon  The weather was not kind, cloudy, rainy and somewhat cold for a Queenslander. I found directions to Glenmore, which was where my great great grandfather Murdoch Nicholson and his wife Marion McInnes were born in 1835 and 1830. The road led up into the mountains then along the ridge to a collection of mostly modern houses with the odd stone ruin and wall amongst them. On the slopes below was evidence of paddocks divided by walls, now overgrown with grass where he would have tended the sheep as a shepherd. The wind was blowing fiercely and it was cold and wet and a long way from anywhere. I read how the tenants clawed at the ground and howled in despair when they were evicted and their crofts demolished so they were inhabitable. It was a miserable place today and I imagined how it must have been for them to lose everything they had and be travelling to a strange land where the sun shone. I pulled up and spoke to a lady who lived at one of the houses at Glenmore. She said on a good day you can see all over Skye from Glenmore, to the mountains in the south to the ocean in the west. There were ghosts here.