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

THE PEAT-FIRE FLAME
used to point out on the foreshore, immediately below
Lundale, the massive boulder round which one end of the
ponderous chain was tied. And it is said in western Lewis
that the natives of the Great Bernera used to conceal
themselves behind the Druidical stones at Barraglom, so
that therefrom they might discharge missiles at such as
essayed to cross the narrows without having passed the
preliminary qualification of swinging the chain.
KisiMUL Castle and the Lochlannaich.
One of the MacNeil chiefs of Barra, it is said, driven
out of Kisimul Castle by the Lochlannaich—the Norsemen
—was forced to seek shelter in Ireland. He had two
children, a boy and a girl, both of whom attended school in
Ireland. But the children were at a loss to understand why
their Irish schoolmates took delight in calling them
na Barraich—that is to say, "the Barra-ites." They
complained frequently to their parents about the indignity
to which they were being subjected at school ; and at last
they succeeded in persuading their father to explain
matters. He confessed to them that he was the exiled chief
of an island in the Hebrides called Barra, in a bay in which
stood a great castle known as Kisimul, from which they
all had been driven forth when the Lochlannaich seized
their patrimony.
The boy, whenever he heard his father's woeful tale,
swore vengeance on the Lochlannaich, and immediately
began^ to devise schemes such as might be the means of
restoring the ancient ancestral stronghold of Kisimul to its
rightful owners. Soon he was making arrangements with
the crew of an Irish vessel to convey him and his sister in
an eight-oared galley to the Barra Isles.
When MacNeil realised that his children were intent on
going to the Outer Hebrides in the hope of wresting Kisimul
from the Lochlannaich, he supplied them with certain
sailing directions, since none of the crew was too familiar
with the navigable waters hereabouts. Having explained
to them that to the southward of Barra there lay five fairly
large islands, he told them that, if there still resided on the
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