The peat-fire flame : folk-tales and traditions of the Highlands & Islands

THE PEAT-FIRE FLAME
clinging desperately to the crags, several feet above the tide.
In a second or two he had clambered out of danger to a
spot from which he witnessed the destruction of the wouldhave-been
plunderers from Lewis, as they scrambled
helplessly amid a wreckage of masts and sails and an
upturned boat.
The bodies of most of the Lewismen, it is said, were cast
upon the shores of the Monach Isles. The Heiskeir folks
interred them without much ceremony at a place not far
from the rocks where they met their doom. They say, too,
that a number of stones marks the graves of the luckless
Lewismen; but I have never seen these stones, although I
profess to having examined these islands fairly thoroughly.
And what of Neil, the unfaithful mariner? Well, they
say that so grateful to him were the inhabitants of the
Monach Isles for his having saved their property, and
possibly their lives also, and at considerable personal peril,
that they persuaded him to abandon his lonely house by the
shores of Balranald, and spent the remainder of his years
at Port Roy. And ever after this episode he went by the
name of Niall a Chahhaidh, Neil of the Snow-drift.
And so improved was Neil's health by the attentions of
the kindly natives of Heiskeir that eventually he married,
and begat a large family. And he became the head of a
tribe known in the Isles as Sliochd Neill a' Chahhaidh, the
Race of Neil of the Snow-drift. In later years many
members of his tribe migrated to the mainland of North
Uist; and not a few of them went forth to dominions across
the seas.
The Cattle-Rievers of Aignish.
Within a few miles of the town of Stornoway lies
Aignish, where may be seen the ruined Church of St.
Columba, within the precincts of which are interred the
remains of no fewer than nineteen Chiefs of the hapless
MacLeods of Lewis, whose patronymic was Siol Torquil,
the Seed of Torquil. Dogged by adversity were the Siol
Torquil Chieftains. The early years of the seventeenth
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