Dr Euan Mackie, Honorary Research Fellow of the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow and director of the excavation of Dùn Mòr in Vaul, talks to Dr John Holliday in April 2000 about the implications of the dig for Scottish archaeology and for himself personally.
Initially Dr Mackie requested permission from Argyll Estates to excavate a machair site at Balevullin where A. Henderson Bishop had found Iron Age pottery and other artefacts in 1912. This was refused because the area was used for grazing cattle.
An alternative site of the broch at Vaul was acceptable. Dr Mackie directed the excavations there over three seasons in the early 1960s which produced a wealth of material from the late 6th or 5th century B.C. to the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. The finds are stored in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.
Donald Kennedy (Dòmhnall Eachainn) of Balevullin talks to Dr. John Holliday in September 1998 about his experiences as a seaman during World War II.
In the Merchant Navy before the war, Donald volunteered to rejoin his tanker ‘British Petrol’ which was sunk in June 1940 by a German Q ship, the ‘Narvick’, a warship disguised as merchantman flying a Swedish flag.
Picked up in a lifeboat by the German ship, he and his shipmates were held prisoner on board until they landed in Brest in November. He was kept in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and Poland until 1945.
Hector MacPhail of Ruaig tells the story of the first voyage of Iain MacArthur from Roisgeal in Caoles on his uncle’s sailing ship. He was made to turn out in foul weather to change sail and to sew up the bodies of his fellow crew members after a fever had gone round the boat.
Former airline pilot Bill Innes tells a humorous anecdote about Captain David Barclay, MBE, during an illustrated talk about the pioneers of Scottish aviation held in An Talla, Tiree on 5th July 2004.
The name David Barclay is synonymous with the development of aviation in the Western Isles and with the Scottish Air Ambulance Service. He flew his first ambulance flight with Northern & Scottish Airways in 1935 and at the end of his career had flown more than two thousand ambulance missions.
He was awarded the MBE in 1942 and invested with the order of St John of Jerusalem in 1950. Much loved and well respected by those who knew him, Captain Barclay retired in April 1965 with an overwhelming send-off from islanders in Barra and Tiree.
In a discussion about families living in Caoles in 1881 recorded by Dr John Holliday in June 2004, Angus MacLean of Scarinish tells a humorous anecdote about two old men in Caoles to Alasdair Sinclair and Duncan Grant.
At the time of the story, the two men – Iain MacLean and Ruaraidh MacDonald – were both over a hundred years old. Caoles was mainly unfenced and, despite his age, Iain’s job was to keep the animals within the township boundaries and out of the crops. This was not without precedent.
The Statistical Account of the 1790s recorded ten islanders over ninety and one over a hundred. ‘The Tiry-man above 100, was allowed to be 106, at his death, in spring last. Except for the last 7 years he supported himself and wife by herding. His liveliness appeared to the last, not only by walking but dancing.’
In a conversation with Alasdair Sinclair of Brock recorded in January 2004, Duncan Grant of Ruaig tells a humorous story about his relative, Dan MacLeod, who played a practical joke on Alasdair’s great-uncles, William, Donald and Neil MacKinnon.
In the days before television, neighbours would regularly visit each other ‘air chèilidh’- for the ‘crack’. Alasdair’s Uncle William was a great story-teller and would entertain the township children with ghost stories.
Duncan’s mother, Mary Flora MacLeod, remembered a particularly scary story about ‘cròg mòr fada liath, liath le aois’ (a long grey claw-like hand, grey with age). She and her sister would be so scared of leaving in the dark they would race the twenty yards home.
Hector MacPhail of Ruaig gave a talk at Vaul Golf Club in November 1996, during which he told three humorous anecdotes about a fisherman from Balevullin nicknamed ‘the Goilear’.
Effie MacDonald of Middleton sings ‘Am falbh thu leam, a rìbhinn òg’, known colloquially as the ‘Tiree Love Song’. It was written by Alexander Sinclair (Alasdair Nèill Òig), a wine and spirit merchant in Glasgow.
In the song, he asks a young maiden to come with him over the sea where she will see everything she could desire in the isle of the west that once was his home: geese and white swans, views over the ocean to the neighbouring isles, the green meadows and the tranquillity of St Patrick’s chapel.
He tells her of the songbirds, the bumble bees and the blaze on the cattle, the cormorants and ducks, the marram grass growing on the dunes and the fragrance of the machair flowers, all to be found on his favourite part of Argyll – the green island of Tiree.
Ishbel MacLean née MacDonald of Kenovay was Tiree’s District Nurse from 1955 to 1962. She did her general nurse training at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and midwifery at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness and Lennox Castle in Glasgow.
She married a Lewis man, Angus MacLean, and lived for twenty years in Canada where her husband worked as a teacher. While in Toronto she was given tuition by a professional opera singer. She was recorded by Co-Chomunn Dualchas Thiriodh singing the Tiree song ‘Ma shiubhlais sibh tuath’ (If you travel north).
After their return from Canada, Ishbel and her husband lived in Glasgow and Helensburgh but now reside permanently in her family home in Kenovay.
Mairi MacLean of Ruaig was recorded by Co-Chomunn Dualchas Thiriodh singing ‘’S e Tiriodh an t-eilean’ (‘Tiree is the island’), an unpublished song probably written by Neil MacLaine, a nephew of John MacLean, Bard Tighearna Cholla, and a bard himself.
While at school in Tiree, Mairi competed in several Mods. She won first prize singing this song at the Mod in Inverness in 1972. That same year she came third in the silver medal competition for singing a set Gaelic song.
Mairi has worked as a district nurse in Tiree for eighteen years. Before returning to Tiree she worked as a district nurse in Oban and Glasgow.
