The Skye Boat Song

Anne Campbell MacLeod heard the air in the 1870s while being rowed across Loch Coruisk on Skye, when the boatmen sang a Gaelic rowing song, "Cuachag nan Craobh" (The Cuckoo in the Grove). She wrote down what she remembered, and Sir Harold Boulton gave it new words about Bonnie Prince Charlie's escape to Skye after Culloden. The two published it in Songs of the North in London in 1884.

The song is not in any older Scottish collection, but it quickly sounded old, and people soon claimed to have learned it as children. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his own words to it, probably in 1885. It is sung as a lullaby and played as a slow waltz.