Recon Survey to the Outer Hebrides
to see this in 3D go to GoogleSpheres here
Donald hails from the village of Suainebost in the far north
of Lewis where there is a fantastic community historical society – Comunn Eachdraidh
Nis. This group is working to
preserve island history, language and culture for both local community now and
in the future as well as providing a resource for visitors to the area. This
north part of the island has a diverse range of heritage on offer from some of
our most ancient rocks in the Lewisian Gneiss to the heritage of the people. A
great example of this is the recently completed investigations published in two
books by Chris and Rachel Barrowman on the archaeology and heritage of Ness and
an investigation on the unusual 16C-17C remains on the sea stack of Dun Eistean. Hopefully we will be able to find funding to
work on some of this in the future.
The island of Lewis is justifiably famous for its
archaeology, the centre piece of which are the iconic standing stones of
Calanais (Callanish). The best estimate
of when the stones at Calanais were raised is about 3000BC, nearly at the time
that farming began during the Neolithic here. However it is incredibly difficult
to date the actual erection of stone circles, especially when almost no other structures,
either houses or burial chambers have been discovered in the surrounding
environment. We visited this site in order to check out the wider landscape as
a potential place to conduct palaeo-landscape studies. Since it was a quiet time of year with no
visitors, Donald also took the opportunity to fly the site for aerial
photography. The results were quite
stunning and fit nicely into the quick 360 image that we took at the centre.
We experimented with photographing a number of the stones as
the structure displayed in the Lewisian Gneiss that the Neolithic people used
is quite stunning!
As the day was such a good one we visited a much later broch
on our way back to the north of the island.
Dun Carloway is a remarkably well preserved Iron Age broch (a type of
fortification found throughout Scotland) likely constructed between 100BC to
100AD. It is of typical double wall construction which can be seen in the east
side. The remains were in use, laterally as a kiln until at least 1000AD. Folklaw has it that the clan Morrisons of
Ness (Donald’s ancestors) used to hide in it while they went on cattle raids of
their rival clan, the MacAulays!
