Transcript: VFT 1: South Uist - Interview with Mary MacLeod,
Lews Castle College
Question 1: What do we know about the identity of early medieval
communities in the Outer Hebrides?
I’m Mary MacLeod and I am a lecturer at Lews Castle College. I am a Vikings and Norse and Medieval
specialist and I ‘m also a freelance archaeologist on the side, and I used for 11 years to be the Regional
Archaeologist for the Western Isles, working for the local council.
The early medieval communities of the Western Isles are still really a bit of a mystery, and when I say early
medieval in this case I’m talking about the communities who were here prior to the arrival of the Vikings,
around about AD 800. The debate is really between whether the communities were Gaelic speaking or
Pictish speaking peoples; and there’s all sorts of complicated problems really around answering that
question from the archaeological record alone.
If we were in the heart of what we know to be Pictland in Orkney, on the north east of the mainland, we
would have a very clear material culture to deal with: lots of Pictish symbol stones, inscriptions using the
Ogham alphabet but Pictish language, and various other kinds of portable artefacts which seem to be
focussed in that area we now know to be the Pictish heartland. However, out here on the west coast we
have nothing like such a clear cut archaeological record for this period. For example, we have only two
Pictish symbol stones compared to the hundreds they have on the mainland and up in Orkney. And these
two Pictish symbol stones a relatively plain and relatively early, there’s one in Pabbay, south of Barra right
at the southern end of the Outer Hebrides, and there is another one which came from the sound in
between Benbecula and Uist.
Neither of these is particularly complex, neither of them are associated with any inscription; the one in
Pabbay has a Christian cross carved onto it but it appears to be a secondary carving, so they’re probably
both quite early, possibly pre-Christian.
We have two Ogham inscriptions from the Western Isles, one of them comes from North Uist, the other
from Bornais (South Uist). However, Ogham is an alphabet which appears originally to have been
developed using the old Irish language in Ireland. Old Irish is a Gaelic language rather than a Pictish
language and neither of these inscriptions, both of which are on portable artefacts rather than standing
stones or anything like that, are entirely clear about which language is being used so we really don’t know
the identity of the people who were here in the west prior to the arrival of the Vikings; the material culture
doesn’t answer that question for us.
Another aspect of peoples’ identity at this time, other than their language, and perhaps their section of
their own ethnicity might have been their religious identity as a group. And what we do have, from the
whole of the Outer Hebrides, is evidence of pre-Viking period Christian communities. The church at
Howmore, and various other early Christian sites with pre-Christian dedications, were probably a focus for
these Christian groups but we don’t know whether the whole of the population was Christian or not. What
we can say is that we are starting to get some Christian influence, perhaps as early as the 5th century AD.
We perhaps see this in a shift in the burial patterns: a move from cremations to inhumations, a reduction in
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Transcript: VFT 1: South Uist - Interview with Mary
MacLeod, Lews Castle College
05/04/13
grave good accompanying burial; we then perhaps start to have early chapels, maybe from around this
time.
The earliest Christian chapels and burial grounds we know of are actually built on Iron Age settlement sites
of this period. So the logic of that would seem to be that as people convert and perhaps individual kin
groups convert, they are building chapels and churches in places where they live. Some of these early
chapels and churches, their cemeteries are still in use today. So we quite often find that our earliest
cemeteries are actually on top of earlier archaeological sites.
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