Dùn Èistean

Between around AD 800 and AD 1300, the Western Isles were culturally Scandinavian and politically part of Norway, setting Lewis and the wider archipelago on a historical and archaeological path distinct from mainland Scotland during the medieval period. Dùn Èistean belongs to a wider family of physically similar coastal sites around Lewis and the southern Western Isles, several of which were occupied or used during these same centuries, and excavation at comparable sites has turned up evidence of activity reaching back into the Iron Age or earlier prehistoric periods; it is considered likely that similar early evidence still awaits discovery at Dùn Èistean itself, buried beneath the later dun and turf buildings.

Norse political control of the Western Isles collapsed during the thirteenth century, and in the power vacuum that followed, powerful new clans emerged, among them the Morrisons, Macleods and Macaulays, whose rivalries and alliances form the backdrop to the local traditions and stories associated with Dùn Èistean. The Morrisons of Harris and Lewis are traditionally placed from Barvas to the Port of Ness, and also in the north-west Highlands around Durness in Sutherland, where they were allied with Clan Mackay; their septs include Morison, Gilmore and, in Scottish Gaelic, MacGilleMhoire.

The forfeiture of the Lordship of the Isles in the late fifteenth century removed the central authority that had held the region together, ushering in the intermittent clan wars and strife remembered in Gaelic as Linn nan Creach, the Era of Strife. It is against this volatile backdrop that almost all of the surviving structures and finds on the Dùn Èistean stack date, from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the period when the site served as a Clan Morrison stronghold.

Highland and island society came under progressively tighter government control following the destruction of the clan system after the failed Jacobite Rebellions of the eighteenth century, bringing the era of clan strongholds such as Dùn Èistean to a close. In 2015, archaeological work at the site recovered some of the earliest gun flints found anywhere in the British Isles, a find that points to the island's continued occupation and defence into the age of firearms.

Dùn Èistean is now the focus of a multi-disciplinary research project into the history and archaeology of Ness, carried out under the auspices of the University of Glasgow's Archaeological Research Division, GUARD Archaeology.