Once upon a time in Wester Ross

Written by Steve Webster, a crofter on Scoraig, September 2009

The name Scoraig seems to come from the Vikings. { Click here for a closer look at the name and everything else to do with Scoraig's past. } Vik was a bay, as in the town of Wick up near the northeast corner of Scotland. More often, in later centuries, in the mouths of Gaelic speaking people, vik has softened to aig, as in Mallaig, Arisaig, and Scoraig. Skor in the Viking language was an incision or a notch, from which comes our word score. Skor vik meant something like narrow bay, or bay in the narrow inlet, which describes accurately enough the bay inside Little Loch Broom where the Scoraig jetty and boatshed now stand alongside the remains of an older stone jetty, and the beach where the first Viking longships probably grounded on the southern shore of Scoraig sometime around the year 800 AD.

Cape Wrath, the northwestern corner of Britain up the coast from here, takes its name from Viking hvarth, meaning the turning place. The first recorded Viking longship raiders turned that corner to come down this coast in 794.

In Lewis isle, with fearful blaze
The house destroying fire plays
To hills and rocks the people fly
Fearing all shelter but the sky
In Uist the king deep crimson made
The lightning of his glancing blade
The peasant lost his land and life
Who dared to bide the Norseman's strife
The hungry battle birds were filled
In Skye with blood of foemen killed
And wolves on Tiree's lonely shore
Dyed red their hairy jaws in gore
The men of Mull were tired of flight
The Scottish foemen would not fight
And many an island girl's wail
Was heard as through the isles we sail

~ Translation of a poem by Bjorn Cripplehand presented at the court of King Magnus Barelegs
in Norway celebrating the Viking expedition of 1098, no doubt to warm applause.

The Viking age along the west coast of the British isles lasted around 400 years, from around 800 until around 1200, but it was only in 1540 the king of Scotland finally established his domain over this region. In the time between, Scoraig along with much of the west coast of Scotland and all the western isles was ruled by the Lord of the Isles.

The first was Somerled, king of Argyll. He was a gael gaethil, a man of mixed Gaelic and Viking blood, as were many in west Scotland and the islands in the 12th century when he lived. Somerled means summer wanderer. So does Viking. it meant he was a man who could take them on at their own game, and one of the ways the gael gaethil did it was by redesigning the Viking longship, shortening its length to turn it more swiftly in the channels and narrows of the west coast of nothern Britain. In 1158 he was acclaimed first Lord of the Isles after a victorious sea battle against a Viking fleet off the Isle of Man.

Through the next 342 years, Scoraig was in a Gaelic western kingdom which for a while in military power and cultural beauty rivalled Scotland and England.

Over two hundred years before the first Vikings, in 563 another boat sailed into the western coastland of Scotland, although it was not Scotland at the time, and this one came from the south. That was the year Colm mac Felim mac Fergus, an Irish monk better known today as St. Columba, landed on the isle of Iona with a boatload of fellow Irish monks. Iona just three miles long is off the west coast of the island of Mull around a hundred miles south of Scoraig. They had set sail from Ulster, now in northern Ireland, and their whole journey took place inside the kingdom of Dalriada which stretched in those days from Ulster up the west coast and islands of Scotland as far as Skye, still south of here. On Iona they founded a monastery which would become the star of northern followers of the faith of Jesus.

The story of the old Gaelic church of those days is still controversial. The last king in the British isles who protected the Gaelic church was chosen following long Scots tradition in a meeting on Iona in 1040. His name was Macbeth, and we know what the later official histories of court and church in Scotland and England did to him. The man who deposed Macbeth, Malcolm, took as wife a princess of the London court. She came north with the Roman Catholic priests, worked tirelessly with them to exterminate the Gaelic church, and is known in the Roman Catholic church as St. Margaret. No more kings of the Scots were acclaimed on Iona, and within a century Colm, until then the iconic saint of northern Christianity, was replaced in Scotland by its current patron saint St. Andrew, one of the fishermen Jesus met on the shores of Gallilee. Andrew probably never heard of Scotland, but as far as the new regime in Edinburgh was concerned St. Andrew had the great advantage that he was certainly not a Gael.

The Roman Empire had retreated from Britannia in 406, and had never reached into the Highlands of Scotland or into Ireland, the area of the British isles still known as the Gaeltacht or Celtic fringe. The Visigoths walked into Rome in 410, and in the next century and more, as most historians agree, it was Irish monks who kept alive many of the records of Roman civilization, studiously copying them in fresh manuscripts while libraries across mainland Europe and Britain burned and the church in Rome made deals with warlords of the Franks, Goths, Vandals and Anglo-Saxons.

In the aftermath of the Roman Empire's collapse, the Gaelic church alone spoke the words of Jesus in the British isles until the arrival of Rome's emissary Augustine at Canterbury in 597.

Colm and his monks meanwhile had carried the word of Jesus up Glen Mor to a King Brude in Inverness, along the way noting the first recorded sighting of the Loch Ness monster who terrified the locals but not our brave monks. Colm died on Iona in 597, less than a month after Augustine's nervous arrival at the court of the Saxon King Aethelbehrt ; Gaelic monks continued to spread their word down the east coast of Britain, founding the abbey on the island of Lindisfarne outside the river Tyne which is still in business, though under new management these days, and an abbey on a clifftop over the harbour town of Whitby on the coast of Yorkshire which was taken over by the Roman church in 664 and later wrecked in the reign of Henry VIII. It was through those same mist-shrouded ruins Dracula later stalked, according to his Irish creator. A German shell fired from the sea in World War I put a final hole in the ruined abbey wall.

So what we know of the old Gaelic church is shrouded in mystery and propaganda, and much of what was recorded by monks in that time was later consumed in Viking fires. There is no known written record or visible remains of the presence of Gaelic monks on Scoraig, only the nearby remains at Isle Martin, Mungasdale and Kildonan, and the names of the Bay of Annat and Eileann a' Chleirich, Priest Island standing out at sea beyond Cailleach Head.

The following is a translation of a poem written by one of those Gaelic monks in Ireland around a hundred years after Colm and his comrades set out north from Ulster to Iona :

Grant me, sweet Christ, the grace to find,
Son of the living God !
A small hut in a lonesome spot
To make it my abode

A little pool but very clear
To stand beside the place
Where all men's sins are washed away
In sanctifying grace

A pleasant woodland all about
To shield it from the wind
And make a home for singing birds
Before it and behind

A southern aspect for the heat
A stream along its foot
A smooth green lawn with rich top soil
Favourable to all fruit

And all I ask of housekeeping
I get and pay no fees
Leeks from the garden, poultry, game
Salmon, trout and bees

My share of clothing and of food
From the King of fairest face
And I to sit at times alone
And pray in every place

Here on Scoraig, Annay bay is situated on the northern shore, so any monks who lived there did not have a southern aspect, and people already lived there, so it was not a place of solitude. Perhaps on Priest Island they found places where they could get away from it all. The following morsel gives another insight into the lives of those Gaelic monks. It too comes from Ireland, from an earlier time. Columcille is an affectionate name used for Colm, St Columba :

Mochua and Columcille lived at the same time. Mochua, being a hermit in the wild, had no wordly goods but only a cock, a mouse and a fly. The duty of the cock was to crow the hours of prayers for him. As for the mouse, it would never allow him to sleep more than five hours, day or night, and if he was like to sleep longer, being weary with vigils and prayers, the mouse would come and lick his ear till it woke him. And the fly's duty was to be walking along each line of the prayer book as he read it, and when Mochua was tired from singing his psalms, the fly would wait upon the line where he left off until he could return again to the singing of the psalms.

Now it came to pass that these three precious ones died soon. And upon that Mochua wrote a letter to Columcille in Alba, sorrowing for the death of his flock. Columcille replied to him and this is what he said :

My brother, do not sorrow that thy flock has died, for misfortune ever awaits upon wealth.

What we can see of the old Gaelic church was that it represented some things not so present in Christianity as later European history would come to know it, like tenderness, ambiguity and a sense of humour.

Alba is the old Gaelic name of Scotland. It comes from the same origin as the name Albion, an older name sometimes still used to mean Britain. That takes us back into the mists and mazes of British prehistory, and deep in our prehistory, around 5,000 years ago, the great monument of Callanish was constructed on the isle of Lewis which can be seen on most days west of here. Seen from above, the stones of Callanish are arranged in the form a later age would know as a Celtic Christian cross. Of the people living here in that time we know very little. We do not know what language they spoke. They may have known of Callanish, and perhaps of her sister monuments, away north on Orkney, away south as far as Stonehenge and Carnac on the Brittany coast of northwest France, away west at Newgrange on the coast of Ireland.

Dun Lagaidh, on the south shore of Loch Broom, a few miles inland of the Scoraig peninsula.

Looking west, seaward. Ullapool is in the background.

The stronghold appears to have been last reinforced around 2,300 years ago.

The oldest traces of humanity in our region are in the form of shell middens, piles of discarded seashells after ancient feasts about 8,000 years ago.

Some of these shell middens scattered up the west coast and island shores of Scotland got so big that they were used as platforms on which later buildings were constructed.

How long ago people first lived on this site, or on Scoraig, we do not know.