The Red Monk
By Phil Baarda
The Red Monk, he came out the west, originally from over the Irish sea in the 7th century, and then he journeyed out of the settlement he'd founded at the place called Abercrossan, 'the mouth of the river Crossan,' and began to spread his word across Scotland. Loch Maree, Amulree, Kilmolruy, Killarrow place-names familiar to us now in Highland, Moray, Perthshire, all come from the Red Monk, St Maolrubha.
Here, too, he stopped, where the high land meets the low, where the salmon-heavy Black Water and Conon rivers meet. Here, at the once-vast swampy floodplain of trees and scrub and back channels, still known as Coille Uisge, the wet woodland, is Contin 'Cunndain', the confluence of the waters, where today's A835 Ullapool road meets the branch off to Strathpeffer.
On a low flat island in this marshy swamp land, with hills rising around, he founded another monastic settlement. Or so we're told, because now all that's here on this island now is rough grazing and woodland, and the occasional lingering morning mist in the almost otherworldly silence. There's a modest, some say ugly, Victorian church squatting within a small, oddly-shaped, off-oval churchyard, overlooked by the ancient chambered cairn burial ground of Praes Mairi 'Maolrubha's thicket'.
And the old words, they're what remain, the names in the landscape, still telling us across the centuries of the Red Monk and his world.
Image provided by Phil Baarda
Parish Church, Contin Island
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