Another grisly story about our Uig hero, Dòmhnall Càm, who has a much less heroic reputation in other parts of the island. This is from Capt FWL Thomas’s Traditions of the Macaulays (1880) and he notes that “this tale is certainly mythical”. We ought in our own day to be very thankful to that Divine [...]
Read more →By long and solid tradition in Uig, the spot where the Uig Chessmen were found in 1831 is held to be the Bealach Ban, a hollow in the dunes in Ardroil. In November of last year, a paper by Dr David Caldwell et al in Mediæval Archaeology proposed that, on the evidence of the Ordnance [...]
Read more →This is the final section of an interesting and detailed piece on the Pygmies Isle (first mentioned by Dean Monro in 1549 as having been inhabited by “little people”) near the Butt of Lewis , published by WC Mackenzie in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquities of Scotland, 13 March 1905 (vol XXXIX, p257). It’s [...]
Read more →Donald Òg was the younger of two sons called Donald, born to Dugald Macaulay, tacksman of Brenish, in the late 17th century; he was the great-grandson of Domhnall Càm. Rev William Matheson’s columns on the Macaulays, published in the Gazette in the 1950s, include several stories about Donald Òg drawn from the Morrison manuscripts. He [...]
Read more →Dolly Doctor wrote in Tales and Traditions of the practice of performing the t-ainmean in the upper end of Uig – evidently the last man to carry it out was a Mackinnon, grandfather of Dolly Doctor’s informant, so perhaps towards the end of the 18th century. This offering was made to a god of the [...]
Read more →A letter from the Rev Alexander Macleod (formerly Established Church minister in Uig, who had taken his congregation to the Free Church in 1843 and left Uig shortly thereafter for Lochalsh) to Lady Hood, his previous patron. See also a letter from 1824. Lochalsh 19th March 1844 My very dear and much respected friend, I had [...]
Read more →After Rev Alexander Macleod and the entire congregation left the established Church in 1843 for the Free Church, the manse at Baile na Cille was vacant for nearly two years. In 1845, David Watson, a native of Croy, educated in Aberdeen, was received as a probationer and required to preach in Uig on 16 February 1845, [...]
Read more →A further entry from the 1851 Diary of John Munro Mackenzie, enumerating his difficulties in getting the emigrants away. They sailed first for Troon, and thence for Quebec. It seems the Marquis of Stafford that took them to Canada was a steamer, unless the reference here refers to another boat that transfered them to Troon first [...]
Read more →Further to the clipping from 1917 about Uig adopting summer time a year after it was officially introduced, it seems that throughout Lewis there were further difficulties with the concept. The following is from Eilean an Fhraoich of 1965, in an article looking back to 1925. Summer time had been introduced during the war but [...]
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