Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/168

 160 the difficulty experienced in bringing the body ashore, owing to the depth at which it lay and the rocky surroundings of the place, not a soul in the crowd which began to gather would render the slightest assistance, though repeatedly asked to do so. The police, however, managed to recover the body, which was then removed to an outhouse, the use of which was granted by Mr. K. Mackenzie of Moorfields, as neither friend nor neighbour of the deceased would give the corpse admission on any account. A coffin was obtained, and a horse and cart procured to convey the body to the village burying-ground. By this time a crowd of about sixty men had collected. They deforced the authorities, and peremptorily refused to allow the remains of a suicide to be taken to any burying-ground which was within sight of the sea or of cultivated land, as such a step would prove disastrous both to fishing and to agriculture, or, in the words of the almost universal belief of the crofting-fishing community of the north-west, it would cause famine (or dearth) on sea and land. Some of those in the crowd found great fault with the police for taking the body out on the wrong side of the river! The police, of course, were powerless against such numbers, and the result was that the horse was unyoked and the cart on which the remains lay was wheeled about and conveyed for several miles over the hills, where beyond sight of sea and cultivated land the body was unceremoniously deposited in mother earth. The police, who followed at a respectful distance, noted that the remains were buried about three miles from Ullapool, on the way to Rhidorroch Forest. The Fiscal at Dingwall has been communicated with, and it is expected that investigations will be made into the affair. This belief regarding suicides is deeply rooted, and the custom has generally been to inter them in out-of-the-way places among the lonely solitudes of the mountains, and such burials are not by any means uncommon. A few years ago the body of a man who had committed suicide was washed ashore on Little Loch Broom. A rough deal box was hastily made, into which the corpse was put, after which all the tools used were sunk in the sea. The box with its ghastly cargo was then towed by ropes across the loch, thence dragged up the hillsides to a lonely nook behind that range of mountains which stretches to the west of Dundonell, where the box, ropes