Tiree - an historical gem.

by Antonia Senior

This month's post comes live from the island of Tiree in the Inner Hebrides. We arrived a week ago, inside a drizzling cloud. At first sight, Tiree was a little underwhelming - it is very flat, and I am a lover of hills. Beside the grandeur of Skye, the mountainous beauty of Harris or Jura or Mull, this pancake of an island seemed a little low.

But the sun came out, and this island's beauty revealed itself in colour. The wild flowers are thick in the fertile soil. The beaches are unbelievable; the Atlantic's fury has crushed rocks into a powdery white sand. The sea in the island's bays is a startling turquoise. Up on the tiny hill we climbed, the heather was riotous and purple. The skies, I'm told, are dark and thronged with stars. I have not seen the dark, collapsing into bed early after days of surfing, walking, snorkelling, beach-combing and child wrestling. And there is history. History everywhere.

Yesterday's walk. Traigh nan Gilean. 

I can't love a place without a sense of its past. My second novel, The Winter Isles, was set in these seas. The book is about Somerled, the first Lord of the Isles and the twelfth century world in which he lived - a maelstrom of clashing cultures: viking, gaelic and Norman. To get to Tiree, we sailed up the Sound of Mull and I saw the ruined castle at Ardtornish on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula which is said to be his stronghold. We clambered over those ruins five or so years ago, before my littlest child was born.

My then littlest at Ardtornish on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula

Tiree was part of the tussles between the Lords of the Isles and local war clans. But its history is older by far. Worked flints found on the sea-shore are evidence of early hunter gatherers here, about 7,500 years ago.

Tiree is also home to the famous Ringing Stone. This huge boulder seems to have been brought over from nearby Rhum and propped up. When you hit the stone it makes a ringing sound - hence the name. The stone is covered in circular indentations called cup marks, which are prevelant in early Scottish rock art. Archeaologists are not sure of their significance to their Bronze age makers, but the hypothesis is that they are religious in intent.

The Ringing Stone

Each of the high points of the island has its own crumbled  iron age fort - there are twenty on the island dating from around 500 BC. They look to the sea, and to each other. Easy to imagine the eyes scouring the dark waves, and the beacon fires laid ready to light.

Only one of these has been properly excavated, and shards of pottery which pre-dated the brochs were found. In about 800 BC, then, pottery and tools were being used.

Christianity came to the island early - St Columba brought the new religion from Ireland in the sixth Century, and established the centre of the Celtic Church in Iona - a beautiful island just across the water from Tiree. A monastery was built on Tiree not long after.

After the Christians came the Vikings. There are over 3,300 place names recorded on this island, which is only twelve miles long and three miles wide. There are layers of history in the names. A few around the forts seem neither gaelic or norse - such as Caldrium. The next are gaelic names which seem rooted in the Irish based early Christian entity, Dal Riata. After that come the Norse names, which seem to root Tiree in the Norwegian lands. Then a resurgent gaelic culture (started by my hero Somerled), led to a rich seam of gaelic place names such as Tobar an Deididh - the well of the toothache. (For more on the names, there is a treasure trove at tireeplacenames.org.)

There is more to tell, so much more. About crofters and landlords and emigration. About Tiree's unlikely part in the DDay landings. About the U-boat on next door Coll. But I have a beach to walk and a sea to surf* and an iron age fort to visit. Next time..




*this sounds way cooler than it is. I haven't managed to stand up yet. But today's a new day!

SWORDS and SANDALS

The revival of European Martial Arts,

by Antonia Senior

We all struggle with authenticity. How can we best approach the past, weighed down as we are by our tech-heavy, sanitised modern lives?

Last month, I wrote about sailing on tall ships, and how that has fed into my fiction. I am a great reader of swords, sandals and sails. When I came to write, I knew that some of my compulsive, eclectic reading of everyone from Patrick O'Brien to Conn Iggulden, CS Forester to Angus Donald, Alexander Dumas to Giles Kristian would leave echoes in my own work. 

All three of my first books have involved the writing of battles, the bearing of swords or the rush of sea and wind. The second of my books, The Winter Isles, presented particular problems about my relationship to the central character, Somerled, which can be summed up like this:

Somerled: A violent 12th century Scottish warlord, with a sperm-spray of offspring in numbers only matched by Genghis Khan. A father of sons who try to kill each other. A boy of MacDonald myth, who is light of heart and deep of thought. A son of the wild Atlantic seas. A monstrous fighter.

Me: A scaredy-cat Londoner. A mother who frets if her children sniffle. A starter at shadows, a concrete-walker. Weak-armed and flubbery-tummied. Someone who once saw a decapitated squirrel and has never quite got over it. 

As part of that initial process of thinking my way into his world, I persuaded a commissioning editor at the FT to take a piece on learning sword-fighting. Not namby-pamby fencing, with the silly little pointy swords - proper medieval fighting, with big, heavy swords.  

This was my first introduction to the weird and wonderful world of Historic European Martial Arts. A global, internet-linked group of enthusiasts have, for the last thirty years or so, been reviving medieval fighting techniques using the remaining fighting manuals. An estimated 13,000 people worldwide are now believed to practice the sport.

For my day with the sword-master Dave Rawlings at The London Longsword Academy, we used an extraordinary manuscript. 1.33 is a medieval fighting manual, prosaically named after its position in the Tower of London armouries' catalogue. It is the oldest surviving combat fighting manuscript in Europe, and dates from early fourteenth century Germany. It shows an incredible series of instructions on how to fight - and much to my joy, some of the illustrations show a female fighter named Walpurgis.

A page from 1.33 showing the incredible detail. 

Most of the techniques are for a sword and buckler, a small easily portable shield that is used to support the vulnerable sword hand. One lovely detail, pointed out by Dave, is that some child has had access to the manual on its wanderings across Europe, and coloured in all the bucklers...

Here are some of the things I learnt about fighting with a sword.

1. Swords are very, very heavy. Arm-trembling, shoulder-sapping heavy. This is not obvious when you first pick it up - but becomes clear seconds after holding it aloft. Muscles are a must. 

2. When you first pick up a proper sword, you will feel a fizzing glee. There is something elemental and brutishly satisfying about handling one. Any sword is Excalibur to the one holding it.

3. Looking down your sword at someone who is looking down a sword at you is very, very scary. Even when it's a nice bloke called Dave who is definitely not going to hurt you. 

4. You will think you look like Samantha Swords, the incomparably awesome champion Long Sword fighter who is a big name in the European Martial Arts world: 

5. You look nothing like Samantha Swords. And that is something you will have to come to terms with, slowly and with much regret.

6. Practice. Practice. To build the muscles, and learn the moves again and again and again, so that they become a memory in the bone. Sword skill would take a lifetime to achieve.

I decided, alas, that I was a better writer of swords than a wielder of one. 

*STOP PRESS*

Along with the HWA and a few other fabulous writers, I am curating a new monthly evening of historical fiction chat in London. The first one is on Tuesday. Look us up on https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/historia-history-by-the-river-tickets-33696646577

@historybyriver

Place and the Novel by Antonia Senior + February Competition

Our February guest is Antonia Senior - welcome! It's not often that February has 29 days and hence a guest slot on The History Girls. There's a competition too, so please scroll down when you have read Antonia's post.

Photo credit: Nick Roe

Antonia Senior is a writer and journalist. After studying History at university, she worked at The Times for fourteen years in a variety of roles, including acting Business Editor and Leader Writer. She became a freelance after the birth of child number 2, to concentrate on writing and reviewing books. Antonia writes the monthly round-up of the best new historical fiction in The Times’ Saturday books section. She is a judge for this year’s Historical Writers’ Association debut fiction crown. The Winter isles, the story of Somerled, the first Lord of the Isles, is out in paperback in April.

www.antoniasenior.com
@tonisenior

How the landscape of Scotland inspired and shaped my book: The Winter Isles.


No one thought I should write The Winter Isles. Its hero is a twelfth century Scottish warlord - a man more mythical than historical. A warrior in a brutal age. Me? I’m a middle-aged Mum who lives in London, and cries when my eyebrows are plucked. My agent was kind but wary, my publisher was tremulous. I was furious at my own obstinate insistence that this was the story that I wanted to tell.

The compulsion to write about Somerled was rooted in one thing: my absolute love of the place in which he lived. The wild West coast of Scotland is my favourite spot in the world. From beautiful Barra, with its machair-backed beaches and music-filled pubs, to the empty, purple hills of Ardnamurchan – this is the land that makes my urban soul howl to the moon with joy and hope. And I wanted to write about it.

I learned about Somerled, the first Lord of the Isles, at Finlaggan on Islay. This is the inland home of the later Lords, an eerie, rush-filled loch hemmed in by heather and grey skies. Somerled’s descendants – the Donalds from whom all the MacDonalds and others are descended – were based here.

There are places where you history breathes on your neck, whispers in your ear. That moment when the curtain shivers, and you can hear the clamour of voices, the stories that demand to be told and retold. I have felt that shiver in grand places: Hagia Sofia in Istanbul or the Pantheon in Rome. I have felt it in humble places: the ruined village of Mingulay, the grey mud left behind by the Thames at low-tide, where the hangman’s noose falls from the Prospect of Whitby sign in Wapping. There I was, at Finlaggan, amid the old stones and the drizzle, with an insistent voice in my head. I am the Lord of the Isles. Write my story.

So I did. I went looking for Somerled in the records - where he appears fleetingly and rarely as a sometime friend of, and sometime rebel against, the Canmore Kings of medieval Alba. I looked for him in the myths, where he is a pure Gaelic hero who fought off the rapacious Vikings. I looked for him in the DNA studies – which show him spreading his tangled Norse-Gaelic genes with near Genghis Khan levels of enthusiasm.

But there was not much to go on. His was not a culture of the written word. It was a culture of swords and sung poetry. As a historical fiction writer, I take the factual research incredibly seriously. My books on the English Civil War have been written on the shoulders of giant historians and mounds of primary material. The Somerled shelf on my bookcase – although as complete as I could make it – is slightly stocked.

The Winter Isles, therefore, called for much historical imagination – all rooted in a sense of place. How would this landscape shape the men? What burden would the women bear? How would they cope with the cold, the relentless wind, the winter storms? What would it feel like, to lie in the damp, dark heather, watching the light spill from your enemy’s hall – to be the eyes watching in the darkness? To be the watched?

Clues came from unlikely places. My husband and I were climbing a munro in winter with a lovely guide. His friend had experimented with hillwalking in thick, traditional tweed. It kept out the weather as well as modern gortex, said our guide, but once inside and by a fire, it steamed dry in great white clouds. The best historical fiction is filled with texture, with details like this one.

There were big problems with the knowledge gap. No one knows where Somerled’s main stronghold was. He must have had one. Local legend in Morvern places him at Ardtornish, near Lochaline – a nub of land which juts out into the Sound of Mull. The name means Thor’s Headland in Norse. There is an atmospheric ruined castle at Ardtornish – but its dates are out. There is no archaeological evidence that sites our twelfth century hero here.

Still, one morning, when staying alongside the incomparably beautiful Loch Aline, we walked out to Ardtornish Castle. It was a day of cool blue skies and violent winds. The waves whipped up the Sound of Mull, white-tipped. Across the water, Mull’s Ben More was snow speckled and unforgiving. From the water’s edge in front of the Castle, we could see all along the Sound in both directions. It was empty, but for the skirl of sea-birds. In the times of Gaelic dominion, these were busy seas – full of traders and merchants and travellers.

It seemed to me, standing on the edge of Somerled’s Morvern, that there was only one place he could have lived. Here. Scoured raw by the wind, and a rain that comes in sideways. But visible and dominant, and proud. Fact? No. But all historical fiction is a tangle of knowns and unknowns – and where there are known unknowns we must do our best to imagine fiercely and in good faith. We must rely on a sort of historical instinct.

So I wrote the book that no-one – least of all me - wanted me to write. It was inspired by the land, and rooted in it. And, readers, it has been greeted with a gratifying enthusiasm. Sometimes, perhaps, you have to write with your heart, as well as your head.

FEBRUARY COMPETITION

To win one of five copies of Antonia's fabulous-sounding book, just answer the question below in the Comments to this post:

"Which historical fiction book do you think most successfully evokes place, as well as time?"



Then send a copy of your answer to Mary Hoffman at maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk


Closing date: 7th March


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