Some Uig men were out fishing around the Flannan Isles, and a Viking longboat came along and asked for a local person to guide them through the treacherous Sound of Harris. Murchadh Ban was chosen to go and be their pilot. He was married in Crowlista and all were anxiously awaiting his safe return to the village. However he didn’t return that year to Crowlista and thinking that some ill had befallen him, his wife assumed the status of a widow in the village. Two years after his departure, a foreigner dressed in strange clothes appeared in Uig. He walked past Murchadh Ban’s mother, who was breaking down manure with her hands in the potato plot, and remarked to her: “Haven’t you the filthy job?”

This was Murchadh Ban returning and his mother didn’t even recognise him. The longboat was hit by a gale when it reached the Sound of Harris and the Vikings were so wary of the area that they turned into deeper water and eventually returned to Gothenburg, where Murchadh Ban stayed for two years before he could obtain passage back to Lewis. It is said of him that once he returned that he wouldn’t eat any kind of fish because he was so sick of eating dried fish on the longboat, or because the fish in Gothenburg had not been as good as that in Lewis.

[Bobby] Fischer declared “chess is war on a board”, and at that moment in history it certainly seemed like it. But then it always has. If all games are to some degree a surrogate for violence and war, no game so closely compares to a set-piece battle as chess. Two opposing armies line up to march across the board, foot-soldier pawns in front, officers behind. Every chess-set shows a society at war. Whether that society is Indian, Middle Eastern or European, the way the pieces are named and shaped tells us a great deal about how that society functions. So, if we want to visualise European society around the year 1200, we could hardly do better than look at how they played chess. And no chess pieces offer richer insights than the 78 mixed pieces found on the Hebridean island of Lewis in 1831, and known ever since as the Lewis Chessmen.

You can listen to it and download the MP3 (right click and save link as) and the transcript here:

Listen | Download Audio | Transcript

The rest of the series is worth a listen too, of course; the Vale of York Hoard was particularly good.

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 at Mealista, Taigh na Cailleachan Dubh, has previously met with strong scepticism in Uig, where local tradition maintains that the 92 Chessmen, along with 14 plain tablemen and a buckle, were found at the Bealach Ban in the Ardroil dunes in 1831 by Malcolm “Sprot” Macleod of Pennydonald.

Dr Caldwell suggests that other sources point to Mealista, notably Captain Ryrie of Stornoway, who bought the pieces in April 1831 and the Ordnance Survey records from 1853, and that the Ardroil connection may have originated, erroneously, with Donald Morrison, writing in 1833.

Arguments from the assembled crowd challenged the new proposal, citing in particular the account of the local minister, Rev Alexander Macleod, who lived a quarter of a mile from the findspot and wrote of it in the New Statistical Report of 1833. Also mentioned was the fact that Mealista was inhabited in 1831, and a significant find there would certainly have passed into local memory.

The presentation also touched on the variety in styles, workmanship and possibly originating dates between the Chessmen, which meant that they may have been gathered over a period of time, rather than made as a discreet set. Of particular interest was the work done by forensic anthropologist Dr Caroline Wilkinson on the facial variations between the “families” of chessmen, which may indicate different craftsmen.

Dr Hall said that some of the plainer pieces – the pawns – may also have been used along with the flat tablemen also found in the hoard for Hnefatafl, and that the set represented a “compendium” used by a wealthy individual, for whom luxury goods were a sign of power and prosperity.

A strong message from the presentation was that Lewis certainly had the wealth and power to support a high-status material culture. It is reasonable to suppose that the Chessmen, or the games compendium, were kept and used here in the Kingdom of the Isles, contrary to other suggestions that they may have been accidentally lost while en route to Dublin or some other Viking centre.

Dr Caldwell said that there was still a large amount of research to be done on the Chessmen before all their secrets were known. It is only in the recent preparations for the touring exhibition that high-resolution photographs have revealed working marks on the carved pieces.

It is hoped that the Chessmen will return to Uig for a brief visit during the summer of 2011, for the first time since 2000. The touring exhibition, which brings together 30 pieces from the British Museum and the National Museum, begins in Edinburgh in May and will continue to Aberdeen and Shetland before opening at Museum nan Eilean in Stornoway on 15 April 2011.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been delving into the book of place names collected by the very first Ordnance Survey of the 1850s to find out for myself what’s actually there and to work out how much import can be given to the entry that states that the Chessmen were found in Mealista, in the ruins of Taigh nan Cailleachan Dubha. The Place Names book is easily accessible, on microfiche in the Stornoway Library.

I have to say that it’s an example of meticulous paperwork, a colossal amount of painstaking effort must have gone into its compilation but to the 21st century eye, it looks fussy and overdone. It’s handwritten and ruled out in column after column: place name; its correct spelling; any other known variation of the spelling; the location; the English “significance” i.e. translation of the name; the names of the person or persons who were the authorities for the information and of the Ordnance Survey Clerks who wrote it all down and, finally, a column for comments.

We used to be advised as students not to use it as a reliable source as the information was only as good as the knowledge of the informant and also, because its accuracy could have been compromised in translation. There’s a long time since I last looked at it and this time round, I found its main impact, apart from its painstaking “clerkery,” was the sheer volume of place names in the parish of Uig. Going through the pages nearer home, I felt as if I was meeting old friends as place names jumped out at me from the screen, names I used to hear in daily conversation, which are now rarely, if ever, aired.

I was also intrigued by the names of the local informants of the 1850s. I would really like to go back to it and list them all down to see how many can be identified with the help of the census returns. I found my great, great grandfather, Murdo Macleod, Gisla, (Murchadh Ghioslaigh) and his neighbour and brother-in-law, John Macdonald, (Iain Laghach) reeling off names. That pinpoints the collecting of place names to before 1853 and the Gisla clearance, after which all the Laghach family but two ended up in Quebec.

From memory, I was sure that the Chessmen were noted in the pages relating to the Ardroil area although the name Ardroil wasn’t in use in its present form as early as the 1850s. The farm was known initially by variations of Eadar Dha Fhadhail, such as Ederol. The entry about Chessmen is there, under the place name “Bealach Ban.”  It reads, “A glen on the south side of Camus Uig, it is composed of sand. A few years back a number of carved Ivory images of horses, sheep and other animals were found in this glen. Signifies white glen or pass.”

The authorities for the information are named as John Mackay, Donald Murray and, from the Ordnance Survey, John Morrison. There was nobody indigenous left in Ardroil to impart the place names, they had all been forcibly removed over ten years before the survey and are to be found, household by household, in census returns in Swainbost in Ness, including the widow and family of Malcolm Macleod, the finder of the Chessmen. I haven’t been able to identify Donald Murray, not a surname ever found much in Uig, although there was a Murray family in Crowlista in 1851, Kenneth, not Donald, Murray from Borve, married to Catherine Macdonald, nighean Mhurchaidh Bhain. The most likely explanation is that Donald Murray may have been a Gaelic teacher, possibly in Crowlista, which had a school long before the 1850s. I can make more of the John Mackay: he could have been Iain Macaoidh, ancestor of the Crowlista Mackays, who would have been in his late seventies at that time. But again, we can’t be sure as the name John Mackay comes up in the Survey, in other villages, as the Ordnance Survey clerk.

Now to Mealista, which I had never looked at before and which I found, via the parish of Lochs, which is interposed with upper Uig in the Microfiche reels, and after skimming through Islivig and Breanish, both with interesting information, given by the easily recognized names of long term residents, John Macaulay, Islivig, Donald Macleod, Breanish and Malcolm Mackay, schoolmaster in Breanish. The two entries I found among the Mealista names with additional information other than the actual place name were very relevant to what I was looking for, Teampull Mhealastadh and Tigh nan Cailleachan Dubha, information for both given by Christopher Macrae and Alan Ross, with OS clerk, John Mackay this time.

The Teampull Mhealastadh entry reads: “On the seashore in Mealastadh village. This is an old graveyard in the village of Mealasta, at present there are only a few interred in it, as the inhabitants have left this village. There has never been a church or any kind of meeting house in or about this place as far as can be ascertained.” This is nothing short of shoddy information with two place names mixed up. Cladh Mhealastadh is the old graveyard on the sea shore, the teampull, chapel, is quite separate and at a distance from it, and, as for ascertaining whether there ever was a church about the place, there is no room for doubt on that score with the Mealista chapel, down to its very length and breadth, recorded in the Report of Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland corroborating the oral tradition of the parish.

Translation has weakened the strength of the original Gaelic, “dh’fhalbh na daoine as a’ bhaile,” to the bland English, “the inhabitants have left this village.” Leave it they had, over ten years before, under duress, so that when the Ordnance Survey came round, there were only strangers there. Christopher Macrae came from Kintail, and he had lived in Harris as recently as 1846, we know from census information that he had come to Mealista in 1848 , to the farm which was then a part of the large sheep farm of Hushinish. As for Alan Ross, his is a very well-known name in Lewis history. He was from Lochs, a Gaelic teacher, catechist and later Inspector of Poor for the parish of Lochs, with his home in Keose. He’s not listed as working with the Survey, nor was he the teacher in Breanish, so we can only speculate on what he was doing in Mealista at the time. We’ll never know but we can be sure that neither informant had much local knowledge, other than hearsay. Mealista “exiles” living down the road in Breanish would surely have known more but none of them were informants and then again, we have to remember that the OS were collecting place names, not recording history, although it would have been more useful to us now if some of the effort and space taken up by their elaborate columns had been used to do so.

The entry for Tigh nan Cailleachan Dubha from the same source reads: “A nunnery which was occupied by the order of the Black Nuns, and concerning which no information can be obtained, beyond a number of chessmen having been found in its ruins about 70 years ago which were in good preservation. They were sold to a society of antiquaries in Edinburgh and brought a good price. Nothing remains of it but the site.” Don’t both Mealista entries, with their insistence on no further information, have a casual “don’t bother us” air about them? The Bealach Ban entry, although inaccurate in the detail, clearly ties the find spot of the Chessmen to the obscure hollow in Ardroil machair and also, what dyed in the wool Uigeach, either in 1850 or nowadays, would leave sheep out of things?

The evidence for Mealista, in this Mealista v. Ardroil case, is the Place Name book entries and Captain Ryrie’s remark, both from strangers to Uig, who can have had only brief contact here. On the other hand, there’s contemporary evidence for the Bealach Ban: the minister in the vicinity at the actual time of the find, writing his report for the Statistical Account within four years; Donald Morrison, An Cubair Ban, from the Loch Resort area and living in Stornoway, who died in the 1840s and who produced the first written account of the oral tradition of Uig; the known facts concerning Malcolm Macleod, the finder; plus the rich oral Gaelic tradition handed down to us over generations. Doesn’t the case for Mealista close itself with that essentially Scottish verdict: Not Proven.

As for the Place Name book, my verdict on that is the same finishing as it was at the start: it’s not a reliable source for local history, but is a valuable treasury of Gaelic place names. What looking through it has done, is to leave me with a re-awakened sense of the devastating impact clearance had on Uig. These two fertile villages, with their evidence of early civilisation, and many more, were emptied of their people and left with no one but strangers to speak for them.

©Anna Mackinnon

Our Chessmen were in the news again this week with the publication of new research which has a controversial edge to it. For the first time – to my knowledge anyway – the authenticity of Ardroil as the find place of the Chessmen is challenged. The authors of the report strongly suggest that Mealista, not Ardroil, is the place and having read through the whole paper, I am not impressed by their evidence.

It’s flawed. Flawed because not only does it exclude relevant local information, it rubbishes it. Just as well that it’s written up in conditionals – “possibly”, “probably”, “could have”, “might have”, “conceivably”, “we suggest”, but don’t get the wrong impression here. The research behind it has been thorough and wide-reaching, apart from the local aspect. They have gathered together strands of valuable and interesting information especially on the history of board games and on the Norse influence on western Scotland. I found particular interest in extracts from the Nordic sagas and certainly in the really new aspect of this research, ie Dr Caroline Wilkinson’s contribution which is ground-breaking. She is to be found at the University of Dundee, her speciality is Human Identification from Anatomy and her analysis of the facial features of the chessmen is very detailed and completely fascinating. But, in my eyes, the rubbishing of the locals, both past & present, devalues the entire report.

The Statistical Accounts of the parishes of Scotland have always been acknowledged to be the cornerstones of historical research. Isn’t that their raison d’être? The New [1833] Account of the Parish of Uig, written by the Rev Alexander Macleod of Baile na Cille, includes this entry about the discovery of the Chessmen:

In the year 1831, a considerable number of small ivory sculptures resembling chessmen, and which appeared to be of great antiquity, were found in the sands at the head of the bay of Uig, and have been since transmitted to the Antiquarian Society of Edinburgh.

His entry is a model of concision, giving when, what, where and what happened next; the fact that it’s in the Statistical Account gives an indication of the significance of the find, and, note this, it was written just two years later. This latest piece of research just gives it a mention in the passing and concludes that Alexander Macleod’s information was probably second hand! They have based their case for Mealista on an entry in the notebook, used during the first Ordnance Survey of the early 1850s, to take down place names. “Chessmen, which were sold to ‘a society of antiquaries in Edinburgh’ were found in the ruins of the nunnery about 70 [sic] years previously.” Nothing then remained of the nunnery but the site.

Although the entry actually states 70 years, the OS Notebook dates to 20 years after the find and this is the secondhand information, not the Statistical Account’s! Secondhand, because the Ordnance Survey had a language problem. The OS personnel didn’t understand Gaelic and, as they were recording their place name information from Gaelic speakers who had no English, they were dependent on translators who were, usually, young local men more interested in their pay than in the accuracy of the translation. What this notebook entry gives is the translator’s take on the Chessmen. It was certainly secondhand, it might even have been third hand – twenty years later? And yet, credence has been given, in this research, to the OS notebook rather than the Statistical Account! Rightly enough, these OS notebooks have never been regarded as sources of accuracy and many place names, in both Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, are evidence of the language difficulty.

Malcolm Macleod, Pennydonald, the finder of the Chessman, who has invariably been given a bad press, is not given much credit this time round either. Barely mentioned, he’s been airbrushed out with, “Little was heard of Malcolm Macleod after 1831″ – the inference there being that he had nothing to tell. If a case is to be made for an alternative find site, you can’t have the original finder going about talking to people and taking them into the machair to show them the very sandbank. We know that little was indeed heard of Malcolm Macleod after 1831 but locally, we know why. His name hasn’t disappeared out of history, however, successive generations, both here in Uig and in Ness, have known of him as the man who found the Chessmen.  Nowadays, the information board beside the large figure of the King in the machair behind the site of his home ensures that visitors can access the story.

Neither, in the making of the alternative case, can credence be given to anyone around now who is still promoting the Ardroil site and this research finds that “the folklore element continues to grow.” There is actually “a local crofter on the Ardroil Estate” who is perpetuating the myth. “She” claims to know the precise find spot on the grounds that she belongs to a family that has been in Ardroil since the 1840s. The authors conclude that oral tradition over such a long period cannot be relied on. I had no difficulty in identifying the crofter or in recognising the distortion and skewing of facts.

Nobody here claims to know the precise find spot but we do know the area and we know the site of Malcolm Macleod’s house; we know because our elders took the trouble to ensure that we knew our own history. We are also familiar, in this part of the world, with the disparaging use that is sometimes made of the term “crofter”, and it is particularly disappointed to find this coming out of the National Museum of Scotland or any other Scottish museum. Don’t museums usually value oral tradition? This paper pays little heed to Uig’s wealth in that respect and no heed whatsoever to the corroboration of tradition through documentary evidence.

The other plank in the case for Mealista is Mr/Captain John Ryrie. They suggest him as a possible finder, in or near Taigh nan Cailleachan Dubha. It is a known fact that he was the man who presented the Chessmen in Edinburgh in April 1831 and it has been thought that he might have been the person who came to Uig to fetch them after the Rev Alexander Macleod had reported the find to Stornoway. It was reported at the time that Ryrie said that the Chessman had been found in Uig near Taigh nan Cailleachan Dubha so the latest conclusion is that if he knew that, he must have been the person to find them and, if not Ryrie himself, then a relative of his! It has long been known that Ryrie was a member of a Stornoway sea-faring family. Would he have been familiar enough with Uig to know that Mealista and Ardroil are some six miles apart given that Taigh nan Cailleachan Dubha was the land mark commonly used to denote the extent of Lewis and that there was hardly a road in the parish in 1831? Would this not have been the equivalent of the “somewhere in the wilds of Uig” that you would get from the coves or blones of today if asked to explain where something over here was?

Several of the significant sites of Mealista are discussed as possible locations for the Chessmen. I found that part of the paper somewhat chaotic and at that point, I lost the thread. The authors of the report actually say that there has never been local input into investigations of the Chessmen and they finish by calling for a full archaeological survey of Mealista.  Wouldn’t we all welcome that, plus the long overdue dig of the Bealach Bàn.

New research has cast doubt on traditional theories about the historic Lewis Chessmen. The 93 pieces – currently split between museums in Edinburgh and London – were discovered on Lewis in 1831.

But the research suggests they may have been used in both chess and Hnefatafl – a similar game that was popular in medieval Scandinavia. It also casts doubt on the traditional theory that the ivory pieces were lost or buried by a merchant.

The research was led by Dr David Caldwell of the National Museum of Scotland, who believes the Lewis chessmen were more likely to have belonged to a high-ranking person who lived on Lewis.  Read on »

The paper questions the findspot – long established here to have been in the dunes on the edge of Traigh Uig – and inevitably the legends that have come to be associated with the find; and also the identity of Malcolm Sprot, of whom there is “no record” after 1831.  (We know his family was evicted from Pennydonald and he died shortly thereafter; his relations are still in Uig.)

The piece also suggests the chessmen may have been used for Hnefatafl, a mediaeval table game which it says has not survived into modern times… not strictly true, as we sell Hnefatafl sets at Uig Museum (£22 including P&P – just ask.)

I can imagine some Uigeachs disagreeing violently with the conclusions in the paper, but it does offer some discussable theories and a very detailed bibliography.  A copy is available to peruse in the Museum.

And we get a wee mention in the footnotes.

Meanwhile, the Radio Café (BBC) today was all about the chessmen, with the authors of this paper including a facial-reconstruction expert; listen again on iPlayer, until 17 November.

It’s described as “a powerful story of betrayal, romance and struggle, set in an England of turmoil, upheaval and glory. Uhtred, a Northumbrian raised as a Viking, a man without lands, a warrior without a country, has become a splendid heroic figure.”

Not sure what it’s got to do with the Chessmen.  If you know of other instances of the Chessmen being used (besides in the Harry Potter film), I’d be interested to hear of them and will compile a list.

There are twelve warders, or rooks, all of whom defend themselves with shields decorated in a similar fashion to the knights’.  They are represented as foot soldiers and each carries a sword.  All wear helmets, apart from one who, along with three others, bites the top of his shield in the most disturbing manner.  It was [Sir Frederic] Madden’s expert knowledge of Norse sagas which solved for him the meaning of this puzzling gesture.  He published his finding in his 1832 article about the chessmen for Archaeologia, quoting the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson (c1179-1241):

The soldiers of Odin went forth to combat without armour, raging like dogs or wolves, biting their shields, and in strength equal to furious bulls or bears.  Their enemies lay prostrate at their feet: neither fire not weapons harmed them; this frenzy was known as Berserksgangr.

‘Berserker’, which gave us the modern word ‘berserk’ to describe a violent frenzy, may have originally meant ‘bare-shirt’ (ie, shirtless) or ‘bear-shirt’.  Both terms express wildness.  The Lewis berserkers are protected by armour, and, although one lacks a helmet, it is the specific act of biting the shield that communicates their frenzy. [...]

The Berserkers, although irresistibly comic to a modern audience, were probably not conceived as figures of fun, but as serious fighting machines who embodied a heroic ideal.  They appear in a literary context, for instance in the Heimskringla, as an expression of poetic nostalgia for a lost, golden age.  Rather as with characters from the pagan Classical past, the heroes of Norse mythology may have been used as sumbols for the coming of Christianity.

[Similarly] the queens, often viewed by a modern audience as looking bored or worried, are rather more likely to be communicating contemplation, repose and possibly wisdom.

© British Museum

Uig Hall, 7.30pm, Friday 30 January.  All welcome; tea served; free.