The great feud between the clans Campbell and MacDonald in the early seventeenth century AD was part of a power struggle for control of Islay, the seat of the Lord of the Isles, and encompassed wider political, economic and religious change in the region and beyond from the sixteenth century. The discovery of a seal matrix found during excavations at Dunyvaig Castle reveals the personal story of Sir John Campbell of Cawdor (1576–1642) in these broader political events.

Basking sharks Cetorhinus maximus tend to aggregate in summer at favoured locations along Britain and Ireland's west coast. Sharks have been described approaching and close-following one another, often to one side. This has been interpreted as putative pre-mating behaviour. At aggregation sites around the Inner Hebrides we used boat-based observation and in-water and overhead drone video-photography to document behaviour and to determine the sex of individuals. It was confirmed that a shark will frequently move purposely towards another from a distance and swim to maintain a position either directly behind or closely to one side of a conspecific for short periods. Contrary to expectation, we found no relationship between the sex of a shark or its size and close-following. This suggests that following behaviours are not mainly related to courtship. Further, abrasions on the nose suspected to be related to male behaviour were found to occur on both sexes, although abrasions on pectoral fins, similarly suggestive of mating-related behaviour, were predominantly on females. Breaching by basking sharks has also been proposed as a means of attracting the opposite sex. We observed breaching by solitary sharks but commonly by sharks within aggregations, and at other times by more than one shark on the same day at the same time; but there was not any clear evidence to indicate that breaching is primarily related to mating. More likely individuals show close following chiefly for feeding-related hydrodynamic advantage. It remains plausible however that mature sharks make use of feeding aggregations to initiate pre-courtship behaviour.

Research on the Mesolithic in the west of Scotland has been gathering momentum since the 1980s. Here, Steven Mithen analyses dates for near-by islands and proposes possible settlement models for the Mesolithic.

The tholeiitic, columnar (Staffa type) lavas found at, and near, the base of the Tertiary lava succession on the Isle of Mull contrast markedly with overlying transitional tholeiiticalkalic Mull Plateau Group lavas, and as a result previous workers have classed the Staffa type lavas as a distinct group. The Staffa type lavas are among the most contaminated in the British Tertiary Igneous Province and have equilibrated and fractionated at shallow depths within the crust (relative to the overlying Plateau Group lavas), so obscuring the chemical identity of their parental magma. However, Staffa type lavas which are more basic than examples hitherto reported help in the elucidation of the parental magma. It is demonstrated that the Staffa type lavas were derived from a parental magma which was compositionally similar to that of Plateau Group lavas. The primary reasons for the distinctive features of the Staffa type are related to post-mantle melt generation processes, i.e. to extensive crystal fractionation and to crustal contamination at shallow crustal depths. The lavas are compositionally and temporally unrelated to the Hebridean tholeiitic magma types, the Central Mull Tholeiite type and the Skye Preshal More type.