Sacred Landscape on Islay

Time Team Unearth A Sacred Landscape At Loch Finlaggan on Islay

A report by John Billingsley from Northern Earth 62

Many of our readers will probably be also fans of Channel Four's Time Team. For those unfamiliar with it, the programme takes a small group of archaeologists out to certain sites to perform an intensive three-day investigation. The short time involved naturally places constraints on what can be found. The results are sometimes disappointing and always frustrating to a greater or lesser extent.

However, the team recorded what may be their greatest success, and certainly one which caused a lot of excitement at Northern Earth HQ, between June 24-26, 1994, when they were asked to help with the complex site at Loch Finlaggan on the island of Islay in Scotland. Just two weeks after their work there, and several months before the programme was screened, John Michell published his latest book At the Centre of the World (reviewed in NE 59), and the Channel 4 archaeologists had unwittingly turned up evidence that showed once again Michell's timely insight into our ancient heritage.

Michell's book, if I may be all too brief, shows how often places chosen for the seat of government in Celtic and Viking territories were carefully surveyed and located in the dead centre of the region or island. Occasionally, however, they deviated from the precise location for other geomantic reasons. That is where Loch Finlaggan comes in.

The Western Isles were originally subjugated by Norwegian invaders in the ninth century, and along with the Isle of Man and part of Ireland came to fall under the dominion of a Norse king. In the thirteenth century the Scots regained control of the islands but integrated with the Viking descendants. One of the families created by the intermarriage of Norse and Gaelic was the MacDonalds; they were from Islay, and in the fourteenth century were proclaimed Lords of the Isles. Their seat was at the centre of the island and became the annual meeting site for the Council of Island Chiefs, where suits were heard and laws proclaimed. The precise site was Eilean na Comhairle (Council Island), an islet in Loch Finlaggan; their castle was on the neighbouring island of Eilean Mor, standing between the islet and the mainland, to which they were linked by a causeway. New kings were installed at Finlaggan, placing their foot in an appropriately shaped hollow cut into the rock and declaring his intent to uphold the honours and duties of his position. However, it is not known if the inauguration took place on the islet, or on a natural mound, Cnoc Seannda, near the shore on the mainland; the mound looks somehow significant and indeed has turned out to be a key element in demonstrating the long-standing sacred character of this area.

Michell and others comment how Finlaggan's setting is less than picturesque. It is also, contrary to the general norm Michell has demonstrated, not in the centre of the island, nor on the true main north-south axis. So in this case "the qualities of the place are evidently more symbolic than aesthetic... whoever first picked out Council Island was prepared to compromise between ideal and actual geography" Michell notes the striking similarity between the offshore islet of Finlaggan and that which housed the Thing (Viking government moot) at Tingwall in the very centre of the Shetlands, and concludes that Finlaggan was chosen in imitation of Tingwall. He further shows how the Celtic forms which persisted in the mediaeval traditions were strongly Celtic, indicating "that it was a place of ritual long before the Norsemen came". It now appears that it even predated the Celts.

Michell does not mention Cnoc Seannda, but the Finlaggan Trust asked the Time Team to have a look at both the waters between the islands and the hillock, and it was on and around the latter that remarkable discoveries were made. Among the first were mesolithic flints indicating a workshop site there seven thousand years before the Lords of the Isles. The next day indications were found of a stone structure on the hill, a chamber measuring 16 x 5 feet; and before the excavation there came to an untimely end, there were revealed the bones of an animal that had been buried intact - an apparently ritual deposit in a roofed underground chamber that may have been a neolithic long barrow and clearly requires careful excavation at a later date (not too much later, I hope!).

There was thus evidence for activity reaching back many more centuries than had been thought, with ritual attention possible even as far back as the Neolithic period; but that wasn't all. Another investigation had been started at the single standing stone, about five feet high, near the hill. A seventeenth century report had talked of two stones and Carenza Lewis had noticed variations in the height of grasses nearby, which indicated the possibility of other features. Probes and geophysics confirmed this hunch; the indications were that a stone circle or stone row had once accompanied the remaining standing stone. As the Time Team described it "we were able to build up a picture of a ritualistic prehistoric landscape around Cnoc Seannda, with the chamber at its centre and a stone row aligned with the islets and the Paps of Jura".

The italics are mine, because coincidentally in the Spring 1994 issue of Northern Earth (NE 5 7) shortly before the Time Team went to Islay, I had introduced the idea, based on observations at various ancient sacred sites, that the saddle was an ancient sacred landscape, and this proposition has been supported in various places from Cornwall to Wales and the Isle of Man to Northumberland. I had first connected Romano-Celtic sites with saddles, but suspected through observations at older sites that the association may predate the Celts, and Craig Chapman furthered these thoughts in 'Moons, Saddles and Mountains' in NE 60. So here was the Time Team presenting evidence for an ancient alignment - in itself a finding to delight every earth mysteries heart -within a ceremonial landscape deliberately targeted at a saddle! (The Paps, by the way, in fact comprise three peaks, but only two of them, forming the saddle-like horizon, are visible in the Finlaggan alignment). Given this apparent relationship, may the twin hills of Hoy have played a similar role in the sacred landscape of Orkney, forming, as they do, such an imposing and indeed saddle-like feature ( though not a saddle as such) of the horizon to the south of the great Stones of Stenness and Maes Howe chambered tomb?

It is apparent, then, that the reason why the Norsemen chose Islay's Finlaggan for their Thing-site was not because it was so similar to Tingwall, although that was doubtless a bonus, but because it was already an established sacred landscape with over-riding credentials for its assumption into the mechanics of public gatherings and government. What is also apparent is that serious attention now has to be paid to the idea that double-crested mountains and saddles were once significant landscape features that were positively sought at some at least of our prehistoric monuments, and possibly over a long period of time thereafter. I look forward to reports of saddles observed (or otherwise) at other sites in Northern Britain and elsewhere, and to future excavations on this remarkable site.

This article is partly comprised of information from: John Michell, At the Centre of the World, T& H, 1994; The Time Team Reports, Channel 4 TV, 1995; 'The Saddle - a Sacred Landscape?' NE 57 .

John Billingsley

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