Grubbing cabbages by traditional farming methods in the early 1960s. Muck was well known for producing high quality cabbages. © Scottish Life Archive, licensor Scran
Small landscape but a big story
T
he forgotten stories of four of Scotland’s islands have been explored, for the first time as part of a single project, to uncover the true historic value of the lands known collectively as the Small Isles. Situated on the sea routes running up the west coast of Scotland these islands share a rich but often bloody history. Each offers great insights into Scotland’s past, from its first inhabitants to the key moments of Highland history, from the Lordship of the Isles through to the Clearances and the rise of crofting and community. Once populated with some 1,600
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people all four of the islands are now permanently inhabited with just 200 residents or so in total. Rum, and its 45-strong community, is by far the largest of the four. It is made up of a cluster of hauntingly beautiful volcanic peaks providing an idyllic backdrop for sea-eagles and other wildlife which inhabit the island, run by Scottish Natural Heritage as a National Nature Reserve. It was here that Scotland’s first settlers arrived on Rum around 7500 BC. Mesolithic man built a community at the head of Loch Scresort where they turned the highly sought flint-like bloodstone into arrow heads which were traded
throughout Western Scotland and further afield. Later, the adjacent fertile islands of Eigg, which is just five miles long by three miles wide, Canna, at five miles by one mile, and treeless Muck, the smallest of all, attracted the attention of early Iron Age farmers. By the early 7th century the Small Isles lay at the north-western frontier of the Pictish kingdom and were fought over physically by the Picts and Vikings, and spiritually between Christian missionaries and practitioners of the old Pagan beliefs. It was on Eigg that St Donnan was martyred in 617. In Medieval times the islands became a stronghold of the Lords of the Isles in Islay. As such they were often riven by feuding and bloodshed over the following centuries, culminating in the massacre of the entire population of Eigg, suffocated in a cave, by the MacLeods of Dunvegan in 1577.