Publication Account
Date 2008
Event ID 567060
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/567060
NORTH RONA (off Lewis)
The site of one of the most complete Early Celtic religious complexes in Scotland, lying some 14 miles off the Butt of Lewis. St Ronan, Abbot of Kingarth in Bute (died 737), is said to have come here on the back of a whale to escape the noise of quarrelsome Lewis women. North Rona was abandoned after the Viking raids, but resettled by a secular community in the 12th or 13th century; when John Morison visited from Lewis in c.1680 it was 'inhabited & ordinarlie be five small tennants'. Disasters, such as the drowning of the island's entire male population, and starvation brought about by a plague of rats, resulted in only intermittent occupation during subsequent centuries; the last resident, Donald Macleod, left in 1844 . North Rona is now a National Nature Reserve with Sula Sgeir.
Sited on a terrace within a thick-walled, oval burial enclosure, Teampall Rònain was probably a hermitage offshoot from the church at Europie in Lewis. It is two-chambered, the almost subterranean corbelled eastern cell being the late 7th/early 8th century 'oratory' of St. Ronan, beautifully constructed with inward-leaning walls bridged over with stone slabs, traces of lime mortar still clinging to the sides. On the west wall, a door with slit window above leads into the 12th century chapel, its west gable still standing to six or seven ft. A stone-paved doorway was uncovered by Dr. Frank Fraser Darling on the south wall during his repair works here in 1938. He also excavated the east end of the earlier structure, unearthing the base of a stone altar and wall niche. Numerous Early Christian and medieval incised cross slabs lie on the site.
The 'village' to the south, dating from the medieval resettlement of North Rona, comprises three groups of sunken beehivelike dwellings, now a grass-grown honeycomb of stone walls and tunnels. One of these, the home of Kenneth MacCagie, was visited by John MacCulloch in 1819: 'The entrance to this subterranean retreat is through a long, dark, narrow and tortuous passage like the gallery of a mine, commencing with an aperture not three feet high and very difficult to find' he wrote, describing the outer appearance of the house as like 'a collection of turf stacks and dunghills'. An open field system is well preserved, with seams of narrow rigs enclosed by a dyke.
Taken from "Western Seaboard: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Mary Miers, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk
