9 - Norse Settlement in the Southern Hebrides: The Place-name Evidence from Islay

Summary

There can be little doubt that the Hebrides were among the first parts of the British Isles to witness the Viking expansion. A location along the sea road from Norway to Ireland means that through traffic, at the very least, was a certainty. Beyond that, however, the extent of raiding and land-taking is not immediately obvious. While the Irish annals report a series of attacks on Iona, contemporary accounts are otherwise vague. For this reason, the Hebridean Viking experience can only be gauged by a process of jigsaw identification using a variety of different sources. The most ubiquitous are the names of places. From the late 19th century, scholars focused on the ratio of Old Norse (ON) to Gaelic material. Early assessments of 4:1 for Lewis, 3:2 for North Uist and Skye, 1:2 for Islay, 1:4 for Kintyre and 1:8 for Arran (MacBain 1893–4: 218; Scott 1954: 189–90) helped embed the idea of a dichotomy in Scottish Viking studies, with ‘extirpation’ in the north giving way to integration in the south (Thomas 1874–6: 503). For the islands closest to Ireland, the concept of ‘hybridity’, albeit in a loosely defined sense, became a keystone of interpretational models. More recently, however, attempts to unpack the place-name evidence have sought to take account of demographic, linguistic and onomastic change in the centuries separating the earliest records from the height of the Viking Age. For the southern Hebrides, the island which has attracted the most attention is that of Islay (Figure 9.1). Lying within sight of both the Irish mainland and the Kintyre peninsula, Islay controls the strategically important North Channel, and with it, access to the Irish Sea. By geological coincidence, Islay’s large expanses of limestone bedrock also provide the basis for a relatively fertile agricultural landscape, explaining why it became known in later times by the Gaelic epithet Bannrigh, or ‘Queen’ of the Hebrides. If any part of this region was fated to attract or repel the flood of Scandinavian colonists sweeping across the North Atlantic, Islay would surely have been near the top of the list.