LITMIR.BIZ

      FROM THE SIXTH century to the twenty-first the long chain of Western Isles, which stretches 130 miles from the Butt of Lewis in the north to Barra Head in the south, has been pivotal to the formation of North Atlantic cultures. These islands are marked by their early-medieval role as sites where ‘thalassocracies’ – the sea superpowers of Norway and Ireland – competed for control. Lewis seems so much like a Gaelic-speaking twin to Nordic Orkney that my leap from Scotland’s east to west felt, but for the language spoken, like a short exercise in island hopping. Catholic Barra, however, is far more like an Irish island than anything that might be encountered in the north. The cultural difference between Lewis and Barra thus exceeds anything the distance would imply. But an outsider’s experience of travelling these diverse islands today is defined by language. As the only great expanse of land where Scottish Gaelic is the medium of life for thousands, this is the primary site in which the tongue’s future is defined. The isles, in all their contrasts, are thus united by a rich sense of history and a vigorous commitment to community and culture. This vibrancy has much to teach historians. The Western Isles in 1970 – hog-tied by national policies that paid no heed to local variation – were not the thriving place they’ve become. The last half-century has seen dramatic rejuvenation that makes this region a model for how peculiarities of place can be assets for modern, global life.

      But the processes that shaped these cultures reach back beyond historic travels of the first Irish monks, and there’s no way to read the islands’ pasts without grasping the geographies that shaped the ebb and flow of local fortunes. This western geohistory is as different from the young, mutating archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland as it’s possible to be. Places such as Barra give the impression of impossible permanence: they’re entirely ancient bedrock that has lain, unyielding, since before the birth of the Atlantic. Large expanses feature few obvious glacial scars: these rocks seem barely to have registered a mile-high pile of ice grind over them. Seventy million years ago, volcanic chaos accompanied the opening of the Atlantic. From the traumas that separated Scotland from Labrador the laval fangs of the Inner Hebrides were born: the mountains of Skye, Rum and Mull are young rock cascades suspended in motionless pouring. But even ructions on this scale were too superficial to cause much change in the old, hard gneiss of Barra. The Outer Hebrides look on a geological chart like a timeless, providential flood wall, built to take the oceanic savagery that would otherwise shred soft tissues of the mainland.