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The Western Isles
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Sites/Groups in this region:
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31 sites
Barra and Vatersay |
11 posts
92 sites Lewis and Harris |
5 sites
Mingulay Island |
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9 posts
114 sites North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist |
6 posts
12 sites St. Kilda |
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In his book ‘Behold the Hebrides’, Alastair Alpin MacGregor (1925) explains how the people of the Hebrides are surrounded by the sea and it though the sea is part of them and they are part of the sea. He says it was known as well as though it were a member of their own family and that to them the sea spoke in Gaelic. He says they listened to what it said and from this they prophesied good and bad fortune, at home and abroad, and how by its sounds and moods they could tell what weather was coming. There was the ‘laughing of the waves’ – ‘gair nann tonn / gair na mara’ and sometimes this laughter would be mocking and derisive when a storm had risked life and feeble humans had struggled to survive it. He also describes the laughing of waves across a great stretch of sand on Lewis in calm and frosty weather as being “weird and eerie”. In the Hebrides there are many descriptions of the sounds and moods of the sea. Here are a few of them. Nualan na mara – sounds like the lowing of cattle Buaireas na mara – restless sea Gearan na mara – complaining or fretting sea Mire na mara – joy and cheerfulness of sea Osnadh – sighing of sea, like the breeze through pine and larch at nightfall Caoidh na mara – lament of the sea. He says that sometimes the sea is totally still and silent as though it sleeps, and the people nearby are lulled into sleep also; and he says that people who live by the sea derive their vision from it. Martin Martin, writing of the Western Isles in 1695 says of the inhabitants of one of the small, then inhabited, islands round Lewis, that they took their surname from the colour of the sky, the rainbow and the clouds. Source: ‘Mother of the Isles’ by Jill Smith |
Posted by tjj22nd July 2013ce Edited 22nd July 2013ce |
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The Hebridean Iron Age: Twenty Years' ResearchBy D.W. Harding: This paper reviews progress in Atlantic Scottish Iron Age studies over the past twenty years, with particular reference to a long-term programme of fieldwork in west Lewis undertaken by the University of Edinburgh. It deprecates the survival and revival of older conventional models for defining and dating the major field monuments of the period and region in the face of accumulating evidence for the origins of Atlantic roundhouses in the mid-first millennium BC, and discusses important new evidence for the first-millennium AD sequence of occupation and material culture. The material assemblages of the Hebridean Iron Age are contrasted with the impoverished and relatively aceramic material culture of lowland Scotland and northern England, and the importance of the western seaways in later prehistoric and early historic times as a distinctive cultural region is emphasised. |
Posted by Hob19th September 2005ce Edited 30th August 2007ce |
Latest posts for the Western Isles |
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Sig More (Chambered Cairn) — Images (click to view fullsize) |
     
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Posted by drewbhoy28th September 2023ce |
Dun Buidhe (Broch) — Images |
 
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Posted by drewbhoy 28th September 2023ce |
Ardnamonie (Cairn(s)) — Images |
 
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Posted by drewbhoy 27th September 2023ce |
Showing 1-10 of 2,719 posts. Most recent first | Next 10
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