The Viking roots of the ancient town of Stornoway

Stornoway is the capital of the Outer Hebrides, the chief town of Lewis and Harris, and with a population of around 7000 it is the second-largest island town in the country after Kirkwall in Orkney.

Unlike most of the ancient towns in this series, we know roughly when Stornoway was founded and by whom. As we shall see, the town was unique in another way in that it was the target for colonisation by Scots from the mainland as late as the 17th century.

From among numerous sources of information about the town, which I have visited twice, I must single out the quite brilliant Stornoway Historical Society and the excellent staff of Stornoway Library.

The original name of Stornoway betrays its Norse origins. Stjórnavágr was that name, which means “steering bay” in Old Norse and is rendered into Gaelic as Steòrnabhagh.

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The town was occupied for thousands of years before the Vikings arrived in the ninth century. There are plenty of archaeological remains to show that people lived in the area in prehistoric times, and of course the magnificent Calanais Standing Stones are just 15 miles to the west, proving that Lewis was occupied at least 5000 years ago.

Pre-dating Calanais is the large cairn at Cnoc na Croich, or Gallows Hill, in the grounds of Lews Castle.

Like most of Scotland, we know little about Stornoway and its environs in the Bronze Age and Iron Age, but we do know that Christianity came to Lewis in the middle of the first millennium, preached by monks from Iona, though there is no archaeological evidence to prove that there were churches or chapels in the area of Stornoway itself.

The Viking raids began in the latter years of the eighth century, and during the ninth century, possibly around 840, the raiders began to settle on Lewis, with the natural harbour at Stornoway probably becoming their main centre.

This was part of the Norse conquest of the Outer Hebrides – which they called the Southern Isles, Sudreyjar, to distinguish them from the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland, the Nordreyjar. Eventually the King of Norway would be overlord of the kingdom of Man and the Isles, and Viking control extended from Shetland to Dublin. It was during that period that the Vikings fully embraced Christianity.

The evidence of Norse settlement of Stornoway can only be deduced from archaeological finds made around the town as there has been no conclusive evidence discovered in the town itself. Nor is there much evidence in the Viking sagas.

Yet its importance as a port for the Norse occupiers is undoubted and the best evidence of Norse settlement of Lewis is the fact that more than 100 place names are of Norse or semi-Norse origin. The Gaels of the Inner Hebrides and the mainland also knew Lewis as the “isle of the foreigners”.

It was only in the 1980s that solid evidence of Norse occupation of Stornoway emerged. According to the website of the Stornoway Historical Society, a major find was made in the grounds of Lews Castle. It states: “A hoard of ‘hack silver’ – bits of silver jewellery and coins cut up to use as currency – was found here [the Shoe Glen] in the 1980s.

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“The coins were dated to the late 10th or early 11th century and the hoard may have been deposited around AD 990-1040.

“Hoards of precious metal were a way of banking money and were common in the Viking Age when international trade (and piracy and raiding) meant a lot of silver was in circulation in the Scandinavian world. The silver was wrapped in a linen cloth and put inside a cow’s horn before being hidden.”

The world-famous Lewis Chessmen may have been a similar hoard.

Stornoway appears to have grown in size through the 11th and 12th centuries and was in existence when Scotland recognised the Norse overlordship of the Hebrides in 1098. But Stornoway was not the capital of the Kingdom of the Isles, certainly not during the time of the great warlord Somerled (d 1164).

It is possible that a small Norse fortification existed at Stornoway but any trace of it has long since been lost.

Norse influence over the Hebrides continued until they were ceded to Scotland by the Treaty of Perth signed in July 1266 by King Alexander III and the Norwegian King Magnus VI.

A castle was certainly built at Stornoway around the year 1300, probably by the clan MacNicol or Nicolson, themselves of Norse origin. It soon came into the possession of the island’s most powerful clan, the MacLeods, who made it their headquarters.

The original Stornoway Castle has also long since been lost, but as with other ancient towns in Scotland, the population around it began to grow almost from the date it was completed. Clan MacLeod’s internal strife and their constant quarrels with the monarchs of Scotland continued until the early 16th century when King James IV wanted to suppress their rebelliousness.

In 1506 he sent the Earl of Huntly to confront the clan chief, Torquil MacLeod, who clearly met with ill fate as he disappears from history at that time, when Stornoway Castle was also burned.

The castle was rebuilt – only to be destroyed in a punitive expedition by the Duke of Argyll. But Stornoway town was still held by the MacLeods when one of the most extraordinary episodes in Scottish history took place from 1597 onwards. Royal annoyance with the MacLeods had continued throughout the 16th century, especially when taxes were just ignored. King James VI was irritated by the many clan chiefs who played fast and loose with taxation, and he chose the MacLeods to make an example of.

In 1579, the king had Parliament in Edinburgh decree that clan chiefs should provide evidence of their legal ownership of their lands, with any unable to prove ownership having to surrender their lands to the Crown.

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Like so many others, Clan MacLeod had relied on their feudal tenure rather than written missives, so James VI pounced. He wanted to “civilise” the Hebrides and eradicate the Gaelic language. At one time, he had thought of complete genocide of the islanders but he was persuaded to allow Lowland nobles to take over the islands. So in 1598 James authorised a grouping of “Gentlemen Adventurers” to colonise Lewis, starting with Stornoway.

Mostly from Fife, the dozen Adventurers included Sir James Anstruther, Master of the Household for James’s Queen Anne of Denmark, and the king’s cousin, Ludovic Stewart, the 2nd Duke of Lennox, so it was very much a royal concept. They had all been encouraged by tales of the rich natural resources of Lewis and Harris, including some fantastical stories of plentiful gold.

According to one account “the king seriously over-estimated the wealth of the island, and expected a handsome revenue from it when it became in reality a part of his dominions”.

He had been led to understand that Lewis was “inrychit with ane incredibill fertilitie of cornis and store of fischeingis and utheris necessaris, surpassing far the plenty of any pairt of the inland”.

The Adventurers were backed by parliamentary legislation and had the king’s support to enforce their rule up to and including “slochter and mutilation”. He even made Stornoway a chartered burgh in 1607 to help the Adventurers.

It didn’t work. Despite the fact that the Adventurers arrived at Stornoway with 600 mercenaries and builders, they were opposed from the outset by the MacLeods, who were not the illiterate savages they had supposed.

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One of the MacLeods served legal documents on the Adventurers accusing them of illegal possession of the land where South Beach is now located in Stornoway.

The Adventurers had quickly built a “prettie little town” on the site, but when the Adventurers refused to respond to MacLeod demands, the clan attacked and attacked; the Adventurers’ ship was captured and would-be colonists were imprisoned or killed.

No wonder they went home to Fife in 1610, leaving the MacLeods’ great rivals, the Mackenzies of Kintail, to try “civilising” Lewis. They would own the island for the next 250 years.

The clan chief’s son, Neil, was particularly fierce in his response and paid for it with his life – even though he was now in England as James I, the king ensured that Neil was hanged in Edinburgh in 1613.

The “prettie little town” did not survive the occupation of Scotland by Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army. In the 1650s they constructed a fort on the site at South Beach and today there are no remains of either town or fort to be seen.

Fishing gradually became the main industry of Stornoway and foreign fishing fleets often used its natural harbour. The Stornoway Historical Society has a feature dedicated to the humble herring which made Stornoway one of the biggest fishing ports in Europe in the 19th century.

The society reports: “In the summer months, at the height of the herring fishing season, Stornoway’s population tripled, from its usual figure of around 3000 to nearly 9000 people, made up of fishermen, herring gutters and packers, fish curers, coopers, carters and labourers.

“In 1899, a reporter stated that there were, on one Sunday morning, no fewer than 930 fishing boats in the harbour. During each week, these boats landed their herring catches to be handled by gutters, who cleaned the fish and then packed them, lightly salted, in barrels. Special cargo boats were chartered to take these barrels on to Germany, Russia and the countries of the Baltic Sea.

“The Stornoway kippering industry was also an important element in the town’s economy. Almost daily, cargo boats sailed away from the harbour with tens of thousands of boxes of kippers, the quality of which earned the product a cachet which was recognised the world over.”

As with the other ancient towns, I will return to Stornoway’s fascinating story in the 20th century and tell more about the way the town developed. In the meantime, as with all my ancient towns, please do carry out your own research. You will find it very worthwhile.

Hopefully I will soon be able to visit Kirkwall and Lerwick and add them to my list of ancient towns, as I need to have visited them at least once.

I ask that anyone who wants to promote their town for a column should email me at nationalhamish@gmail.com. Do keep the suggestions coming and if they meet my criteria

I will certainly expand my list further down the line, just as I have already done with Tain, Rutherglen and Dunkeld, and will do with Dunbar and then Kirkcaldy as a result of pleas by readers from East Lothian and Fife. Also still to come are Hamilton, Kilmarnock, St Andrews, Montrose, Forfar, Kilwinning, Irvine and Renfrew.

For inclusion, towns need to have played a part in the history of Scotland and be “ancient”, which I interpret as being established as a town, usually a burgh, before the Reformation in 1560. I also want to write about towns whose history has been thoroughly researched, with history writers such as myself depending on real historians for our facts.