There are no safes for breaking in the Outer Hebrides, but there’s treasure more worth lifting in the crofter’s huge deep freeze. A verse from the Stornoway Gazette: we didn’t go hungry in 1972.
Read more →David SD Jones, author of a number of books and articles on gamekeeping and sporting estates, has produced a new history of Morsgail, the 14,000 acre estate extending from Kinlochroag to Hamnway and Loch Langabhat. It was laid out in 1850 by Sir James Matheson and used as a summer residence and to entertain guests [...]
Read more →The renowned naturalist William MacGillivray was born in Aberdeen in 1796 and studied and worked most of his life there or in Edinburgh, but he had a Harris connection through his father and spent much of his childhood at Northton in South Harris (where the MacGillivray Centre now bears his name). As a young man, [...]
Read more →[singlepic=637,,386] Many thanks to Donald J Macleod of Enaclete and Bridge of Don for his research into the fishing boats of Uig. He adds that these boats used lines and not trawls to catch white fish. It was the end of March and beginning of April that was known as the ‘Hungry month’ in Gaelic [...]
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The Uilleam Dubh has been a Scarp boat for many years, and the suggestion was that she was built in Brenish, and/or by a Malcolm Maclean of the famous Maclean boatbuilders of Uig, and called after her builder or owner.
Read more →In December 1900, the lighthouse on Eilean Mor in the Flannan Isles, which had only been lit for the first time a year previously, was discovered deserted by its three keepers; their dinner table had been set with cold meat, pickles and potatoes, and a chair was overturned in an obvious urgent departure. Two sets of oilskins and seaboots were missing, and otherwise the quarters and lamp were in perfect order.
Read more →From The Times, 2 March 1858 (with a geographical infidelity) Enormous Shoal Of Dogfish. – From all quarters we are furnished with information regarding the appearance of a prodigious shoal of dogfish along the whole north-east coast of Scotland, and as far as to the westward of the Lewis. This circumstance, so unusual at this [...]
Read more →Winter was always a difficult time for the inhabitants of St Kilda, but the winter of 1876-77 was unusual. From the Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, 1878: When the factor, Mr M’Kenzie, with MacLeod’s vessel, did not put in an appearance in autumn last year [1876], as usual, the inhabitants at [...]
Read more →Stornoway Gazette, 30 December 1949. It is many years since there was a fishing boat of any size in Uig but four Uigeachs arrived in Stornoway on Tuesday of last week with a 45-foot motor-boat which they have purchased in Inverness. The boat will take her new name from the initials of the four owners [...]
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Brenish and Islivig are old settlements, never cleared. In both, the sites of the original clachans can still be seen clustered around the mouths of their respective streams. The houses are now situated at the east end of the crofts, near to the road…
Read more →This report from Hansard, the official report of debates in the House of Commons, dates from December 1893 and refers to illegal steam trawling in Loch Roag and, at least nominal, interest in defending the rights of local fishermen, preferably without requiring them to take three days out to testify in Stornoway. This is the [...]
Read more →From Uig, A Hebridean Parish, by HA Moisley and the Geographical Field Group, 1960. The crofting population of Uig started the second half of the nineteenth century with far less land than had been occupied by their forebears fifty years before, and, although famine, clearance and emigration had slightly reduced the population between 1841 and [...]
Read more →[singlepic id=381 w=610] This article was written by Elly Welch and first appeared in Events. Thanks to Elly for permission to reprint and for the photo of John Macaulay with the Rose. More pictures of the boat (before and during) can be found in the gallery. Wandering along Valtos harbour a year ago you would [...]
Read more →An further extract from the unpublished memoirs of Rev Col AJ Mackenzie, born Kinlochresort in 1887. Here he tells of how the family came to be at Kinlochresort, and also how they left it for the gamekeeper’s house at Uig Lodge. His account of the pleasures of Traigh Uig is here. My father was a [...]
Read more →The Rose was built c1905 by John Macaulay, boatbuilder, of 19 Brenish. She was first taken to Kneep, then Reef, and latterly belonged to a consortium of Valtos men. In 2007 she was gifted to the Comann Eachdraidh, and we commissioned another John Macaulay, boatbuilder, from Harris, to restore her to her former glory. The [...]
Read more →[singlepic=269,303] An account, from the Gaelic, by Christina MacDonald, 25 Crowlista, of her memories of packing the barrels at the herring industry. The picture above is of unidentified Lewis girls at the herring in an unknown port. See the original Gaelic version here. When you went to the herring for the first time, you had [...]
Read more →On Saturday, 12 March, 1932, a north westerly gale was blowing and a heavy Atlantic swell was running. When Angus MacKinnon, skipper of the lobster boat, Margaret, saw the inclement weather conditions, he woke his father, Cain, and requested his assistance as an extra hand on the boat. Though retired from fishing, Cain agreed. Angus’s [...]
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