Johnson, never given to enthusiasm without reason, wrote: "From Armidel we came at night to Coriatachan, a house very pleasantly situated between two brooks, with one of the highest hills of the island behind it. It is the residence of Mr. Mackinnon, by whom we were treated with very liberal hospitality, among a more numerous and elegant company than it could have been supposed easy to collect." The elegance was real. Boswell catalogued the library: Hector Boece's history in Latin, William Cave's Lives of the Fathers, Baker's Chronicle, Jeremy Collier's Church History, Johnson's own small Dictionary, Craufurd's Officers of State. This was a Highland tacksman's house in 1773, not a rural backwater but a household well stocked with the European intellectual furniture of its age.

On their second visit, Boswell recorded a scene he found highly comic: "This evening one of our married ladies, a lively pretty little woman, good-humouredly sat down upon Dr Johnson's knee, and, being encouraged by some of the company, put her hands round his neck, and kissed him." Johnson's reply, in Boswell's transcription: "'Do it again,' said he, 'and let us see who will tire first.' He kept her on his knee some time, while he and she drank tea. He was now like a BUCK indeed." Boswell, ever the appreciative observer, called it "highly comick, to see the grave philosopher - the Rambler - toying with a Highland beauty." Whatever else Corriechatachan was, it was for one evening a place where Johnson laughed.

Johnson and Boswell were not the first literary travellers through this country. Thomas Pennant had passed through in 1769, on the travels that produced A Tour of Scotland in 1769 (1771) - a book that did much to make the Highlands fashionable for educated travel. Pennant's account, with its careful natural history and ethnographic detail, primed an English reading public for the more famous accounts that followed: Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in 1775, and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides published a decade later. Together these three books transformed the Hebrides from a remote curiosity into a place that the literate sought out. Corriechatachan, briefly, was part of the itinerary.

The Mackinnons left Corriechatachan around 1790 and moved to Corry Lodge in Broadford, the larger village nearby. The reasons are not recorded with much detail - likely a combination of changing economics, the growing convenience of village life, and the slow drift of tacksmen toward more accessible holdings. The old farmstead became, and remains, a sheep fank: an enclosure for working with sheep. The walls are partly standing. The two brooks Johnson noted still run on either side. Beinn na Caillich rises behind, as it did when the books were in Latin on the shelves and a Mackinnon hostess sat down on the lap of the most famous man in English letters and dared him to make her tire first.