Qualla: Calgary, Mull

Calgary, Mull: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Bond, CC BY-SA 2.0. Calgary, Alberta has 1.7 million residents, skyscrapers, an NHL team, and an annual stampede that brings in a million visitors. Calgary, Mull has perhaps a dozen scattered houses, no shop, and a farmhouse cafe that closes when the gardener feels like it. The connection between them is one Victorian house, one Mounted Police colonel, and one summer holiday in 1876. Stand on the curved white beach at low tide, watching a river meander across the sand toward the Atlantic, and the geography of the transfer makes a strange sort of sense. Names travel light. They only need someone to carry them.

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Image: Peter Bond | CC BY-SA 2.0

Calgary, Mull: Beach of the Meadow

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit stuartungless, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Gaelic name is Cala ghearraidh, which translates as beach of the meadow, or, more precisely, the hard sandy landing place beside the pasture. Cala is a specific word: not any beach, but the kind firm enough to drag a boat onto. That fits Calgary Bay exactly. The sand here is ...

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Image: stuartungless | CC BY-SA 2.0

Calgary, Mull: The Colonel's Holiday

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0. James Macleod was born on Skye in 1836, emigrated to Ontario with his family as a child, and rose through the Canadian military to become the second commissioner of the North-West Mounted Police. In the summer of 1876 he came back to Scotland for a holiday and stayed at Calgary H...

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Image: Peter Evans | CC BY-SA 2.0

Calgary, Mull: The Pier and the Puffers

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amon Lhaw, CC BY-SA 2.0. The small stone pier at Calgary was built for Clyde puffers, the steam-driven cargo boats that supplied the west coast before roads reached the remoter glens. The puffers delivered coal to the Mornish Estate and took sheep across to graze on the Treshnish Isles, the archipelago t...

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Image: Amon Lhaw | CC BY-SA 2.0

Calgary, Mull: Maclean's Verse

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Starkey, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean wrote about Calgary Bay in his sequence Dàin do Eimhir, completed in the late 1930s. In the poem Tràighean (Beaches), the second verse uses Calgary as a setting for eternity: a place where the speaker imagines spending forever with the woman he love...

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Image: William Starkey | CC BY-SA 2.0