File:Monument in the Ruined Chapel at Aignish. Sketches in the Island of Lewis. ILN 1888-0128-0012 (cropped).jpg

English: Said to be Roderick, 7th Chief of the Macleods of Lewis the last of Macleod chiefs who died around 1498, in 1888. Illustration for The Illustrated London News, 28 January 1888. Sketches in the Island of Lewis, the scene of crofter agitation.

Volume: 92, page 90 , Issue: 2545, page 12
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Sketch in the Island of Lewis, monument in the Ruined Chapel at Aignish

SKETCHES IN LEWIS. The agrarian outrages among the peasantry in the island of Lewis, in the Western Hebrides, are still regarded with anxiety for the serious troubles which those misguided people bring on themselves by resistance to the law and by violating the rights of property. A correspondent, Surgeon W. B. Leishman, of the Army Medical Staff, favours us with a few Sketches of scenes in that remote North British island. H.M.S. Jackal, which is seen lying at anchor in Loch Luirbost, an inlet of the eastern seacoast to the south of Stornoway, is the vessel that conveyed the Government Commissioners of Inquiry now engaged in direct investigation of the alleged distress among the poor "crofters." One of the cases which they examined was that of the family living in the hut, of which another Sketch presents the interior; this dwelling-place is about 20 ft. long, with no window, having light only from the door; and with no chimney, so that the smoke from a peat fire on the floor, thickly filling the hut, comes out either by the door, or through the thatch of the roof. It is said that the thatch, becoming charged with soot and with carbon from animal exhalations, when stripped off the roof makes valuable manure. The wooden box in the corner is the only bedstead, which serves for the whole family of five persons. The floor is deep in mud. At the other end is kept the live stock, which consisted, at the time, of one cow and two ducks. The croft near Ballallan is a more prosperous establishment, the owner possessing several stacks of grain, and many sheep and cows: this croft is inclosed with a "dry stane dyke." The view of Loch Erisort, looking south-west, with the snow-clad hills of Harris in the distance, is taken from the village of Ballallan. On Loch Shell is situated Eishken Lodge, the shooting-box of Mr. Platt, in whose deer-forest the rioters perpetrated their recent deer-slaying raid, for which some prisoners have been tried at Edinburgh, but have been acquitted by the jury. Near Stornoway, and close to the farm of Aignish, where the police and soldiers were stoned by the mob, lie the Hen and Chickens rocks, on which H.M.S. Lively was wrecked, with another party of Royal Commissioners of Inquiry, a very few years ago. The ruined chapel at Aignish, in the graveyard of which, it was complained, an unpopular sheep-farmer had allowed his stock to graze, contains a rather curious monument of antiquity. This is an old sepulchral slab, broken in two, with an effigy of the last chieftain of the famous race of Macleod, the former Lords of the island.