I was at the kitchen table in Canna House on the island of Canna, feeling privileged. The archivist of the house, Fiona Mackenzie, was teaching me how to sing a Gaelic song, Iomairibh Eutrom, a waulking song from the Isle of Skye, about a fairy gathering shellfish, which, Fiona told me, was originally a rowing song.
Waulking songs (in Gaelic, luadh) were, up until the early 1950s, usually sung by women in the Western Isles, particularly the Uists, Benbecula and Barra, to accompany the process of fulling (or waulking) cloth [fans of may recognise
