Pabay: An Island Odyssey

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Pabay is only one of just under 800 islands that lie off Scotland’s coastline. Yet not much less than a century ago, in 1927, the Edinburgh-based Free Church minister and Scottish Highlands and Islands enthusiast Thomas Ratcliffe Barnett singled it out as a special place – and shared his delight with weekend readers of The Scotsman .A dedicated solo sailor who had been ashore on many of Scotland’s islands, he treasured Pabay. It was, he wrote, a peaceful place, like “a mystic island in the Aegean”. Its “green waters”, he declared, “were buoyant and delirious to bathe in”. My younger cousins Rachel and Alison, and others who spent time on Pabay long after Ratcliffe Barnett’s visit, would – and did – say much the same, recalling fond memories of days spent playing around in the natural, reef-protected sandy-bottomed lagoon that lay in front of the cottage. They describe day trips and picnics at favourite spots on the island, given names like Shell Beach and Sandy Bay, or amongst the other small coves that are found between the cliffs on the east side.

Pabay, though, was much more than a secluded bathing pool. For Ratcliffe Barnett, a profoundly spiritual man, Pabay was an “Island of Revelations”. Early Christians who had once inhabited it, he delighted in telling his readers, had broadcast the “news of Christ in an age of dark deeds and pagan superstitions”. Furthermore, Pabay abounded with fossils. Their discovery and the interpretation put on them by several of Britain’s preeminent Victorian geologists had, for Ratcliffe Barnett, “shed fresh wonder on the creation of the world”. n