Starting next week (25 Aug) a team from Durham University Department of Archaeology will be in Uig to investigate some of the archaeological sites in the area, reviewing excavations from 10 years ago and preparing a publication. Two public events.

Welcome to the new-but-familiar CEUig.com. I hope it helps you to discover stories you may have missed previously. It’s also a little more robust behind the scenes, and has room for more in-depth resources that weren’t fitting on the front page very well. So what’s new here?

The National Museum of Scotland is presenting a month-long programme of music that draws on the Lewis Chessmen for inspiration, with a programme that “stretches from Norway to the shores of Lewis”. In partnership with Live Music Now Scotland, the Museum on Chambers Street in Edinburgh is offering 45-minute lunchtime concerts every day during the Festival. Some of Scotland’s most talented musicians – for free – featuring everything from “fiddles and flutes to ballads and brass”. Each concert takes place at 12:45 and lasts 45 [ » read more ]

See the full gallery here.  I was behind the mussel stand for most of it so the selection is limited this year.  If you have more pictures, feel free to send them to us.

Thanks to all who have filled in our wee survey (if you haven’t yet, please do.)  Not surprisingly there is an overwhelming desire for a forum, so we have one now: the CEUig Forum. It’s for genealogy and history questions, but also anything else you’d like to talk about. You can read it without logging in; to comment, you will of course have to register, by clicking the Register link near the top of the page. You have only to give a user name, password and [ » read more ]

Photos from Finlay and Thelma on a long holiday in Australia, with Fiona and the grandchildren; they also met up with Hamish, Mary Peggy and Morag of Enaclete and now Fremantle.

Abhainn Dearg, the new whisky from Uig, will not be whisky until 2011 but thanks to the intrepid Leodhaisiach Mike Donald and his colleagues, a small cask of the new spirit is lying cosseted in a cellar in Glasgow. MacSorley’s Music Bar on Jamaica Street will be the venue for a tasting of the Peacemaker batch on Tuesday 16 March, from 7.30. From the invitations: On February 21st 2010 at the Abhainn Dearg Distillery in Carnish on the far west coast of the Isle of [ » read more ]

Comann Eachdraidh Uig played host last week to a visit from two experts on the Lewis Chessman, who hit the headlines in November with their theories relocating the find-site to Mealista, rather than Ardroil. Dr David Caldwell, Keeper of Scotland and Europe at the National Museum of Scotland, and Dr Mark Hall, curator at Perth Museum, were on the island to make arrangements for the touring Chessmen’s visit in 2011. Their proposal that the findspot was a souterrain on the site of a supposed nunnery [ » read more ]

From the National Trust for Scotland website: The National Trust for Scotland is recruiting for an Archaeologist based in Inverness and on St Kilda. St Kilda has an outstanding historic environment dominated by 19th & 20th century remains with a time-depth that belies the archipelagos remote North Atlantic position and it is the only mixed heritage site in the UK. Working with volunteers and visitors, this is a rare opportunity to work on a remote and spectacular island archipelago. The post holder will be required [ » read more ]

Press release from Buidheann Leasachaidh Ionad Hiort (The St Kilda Centre Development Group), 3 February 2010: A public meeting in Uig, Lewis, this week formally established an organisation to pursue the remit of creating the St Kilda Centre/Ionad Hiort as a major visitor attraction for the Western Isles. The initiative follows the selection of a cliff-top site at Mangurstadh, Uig, as the preferred location for the centre after a keenly-contested competition involving several island communities which bid for the centre. The choice of location has [ » read more ]

From the Scotsman, 17 January 2010: THE owners of one of the remotest shops in the country were celebrating yesterday after a “mystery millionaire” bought a new £16,000 delivery van to ensure the community does not run out of stock. Read more »

St Kilda, one of only 24 dual-status World Heritage Sites, is management by the National Trust for Scotland, which is revising its five-year Management Plan for the islands and seeking input from stakeholders on a number of issues. Responses are invited from anyone with an interest in St Kilda: you don’t have to live in the Western Isles. For more detail and to download the (non-taxing) consultation documents in English or Gaelic, please see the National Trust website. Paper copies are also available in Uig [ » read more ]

A statement from the Uig St Kilda group, 17 Nov 2009. More on the issue here and Uig’s vision here. We are very pleased that the Working Group has confirmed its recommendation of Mangurstadh as the location for Ionad Hiort/the St Kilda Centre. It is particularly welcome that Jura Consultants have responded so robustly and comprehensively to the criticisms levelled at the consultation process and its outcome. Our own belief in the integrity, fairness and professionalism of that process has never wavered and that would [ » read more ]

From the Press & Journal, 16 February 2009: An image of a bygone era on the Hebridean island of St Kilda features on a banknote which enters circulation today. The picture features ancestors of father and son Norman and John Gillies. They appear on a new Clydesdale Bank £5 note, sitting outside a row of cottages on the island, which was last inhabited in 1930. Read more »

A new study of the Uig Chessmen published last week by Dr David Caldwell et al. in Mediæval Archaeology has been getting a lot of press coverage (for instance on the BBC and in the Stornoway Gazette), particularly for the suggestion that the hoard may not actually have been found in Ardroil. Uig is not at all convinced – in fact, generally reckons this new theory to be completely unfounded. The following by Anna Finlayson-Mackinnon, Ardroil, explains why.  A copy of the article may be [ » read more ]