The Lordship of the Isles

Here is where I tell you about my quest to visit every site relevant to the Lordship of the Isles. It's a blog, of sorts. It's meant to be entertaining more than anything, but if you're looking for impartial hints on a holiday in Scotland, then read on, there might be something in here.

The first port-of-call for most Gaels, and anyone else, wanting to find out anything about the Lordship of the Isles is probably the Internet. But, of course, for me it was just a short drive and a ferry crossing to the ancient, albeit now mostly ruined or non-existant, capital at Loch Finlaggan.

That's an inland loch on Islay, a southern Hebridean island, west of Argyll. Now, the island has a population of three thousand or so. But when it was the capital of the Last Gaelic Empire (which is what the Lordship of the Isles is sometimes referred to as) it had a population of at least fifteen thousand civilians and up to thirty thousand mercenaries and their families, who would have used Islay as both a place to settle and to reach Ireland from Scotland and vice versa.

Islay was the centre of trade in the Irish Sea, and all communications between every kingdom or state between Brittany and northern Norway would come through here. This means that the Breton people, the Welsh principalities, the Irish kingdoms, the Kingdom of Mann, the Scots, the English, the Norwegians, and the Scandinavian nomadic groups would all have relied on trade in the Irish Sea. The North Sea was more prone to piracy, or at least piracy that wasn't controlled by any government, so the Irish Sea and the Atlantic was generally considered safer.

That is why it is astonishing that so little remains of what would have at one point been a grand castle and council hall, on two heavily fortified islands in Loch Finlaggan - Eilean Mor (Great Island) and Eilean na Comhairle (Island of the Council).

I am not the only person I know with a fanatical interest in Gaelic history (or a day at the beach). There are others, who, it must be said, did eventually agree to me mentioning them here.

Whether they wanted to look at the fortifications, the architecture, or just take advantage of Islay's actually rather mild weather, they decided to help me out when I suggested raising the funds for a trip to Islay.

Once we'd done that, we could begin the long drive south. It would have been more practical, of course, to go to some of the Lordship's ruins on Skye or in the Outer Hebrides, but it felt like we should begin our tour of everything the Last Gaelic Empire had built at it's ancient capital.

We all met up at my house at first, to make sure we'd got everything. We had a camera each, naturally, as we were probably going to take pictures of different things. I didn't want my photographs of the Celtic architecture amongst pictures of seagull crap and Scottish tourists, now, did I?

I'd told them all that there was apparently a shop in Port Askaig, but no, they wouldn't believe a word of it, and insisted on bringing their own food. Their sandwiches were worse than the ones you get in petrol stations or bad hotels. They raided my fridge for the drinks, found the cupboard where I keep the crisps and chocolate. Then we were ready to go to Islay, besides one thing...

I know all too well how irritated by tourists some members of the Gaelic-speaking community can be. I am a native Gaelic-speaker, but I am not a fan of the Islay dialect.

Every inhabited Hebridean island has its own dialect of Gaelic - indeed, the dialect(s) of Skye and the Isle of Lewis have merged to become the closest thing you'll have to standard Gaelic. But the dialects of Islay and other southern Hebridean islands (Tiree in particular) seem more Irish Gaelic than Highland Gaelic.

If I wanted to not be told the wrong way, I'd need to speak in Islay Gaelic. But whenever I do, I always assume that because it sounds like Irish, it should be pronounced as if it is Irish Gaelic, and I actually talk nonsense.

And I dare not mention it to a native speaker of Islay Gaelic, because I think they'd mention the fact that most mainland dialects (Kintyre, for example) are extinct or have been replaced with modified forms of Hebridean ones. Probably just me being paranoid.