History
South Uist was clearly home to a thriving Neolithic community. The island is covered in archaeological sites including chambered tombs, Beaker sites, a Bronze Age hoard, roundhouses, brochs, cairns, ogham inscriptions, Viking settlements, medieval longhouses and post-medieval industry. After the Norse occupation, South Uist was held by the MacDonalds of Clanranald until 1838 when Colonel Gordon of Cluny bought the island and initiated Highland Clearances to make way for sheep farming, supplanting the crofters with farmers from the Borders, who brought Blackface sheep flocks. The population of South Uist fell from a total of 5093 in 1841 to its present level of 2285. As a result there was large scale emigration from the island.
Lochboisdale became a major herring port later in the nineteenth century. The island is one of the last surviving strongholds of the Gaelic language in Scotland and the crofting industries of peat cutting and seaweed gathering are still an important part of everyday life.
Read more about this topic: South Uist
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)