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Before coming to live in Scotland's North-west Highlands, I escaped north as often as I could to restore my sanity and soothe my soul. This landscape photograph was taken on one such break, in October, the last break of that year. We had been enjoying several consecutive days of blue-sky weather when on this day the weather started to change in the late afternoon.
A bank of ominous looking clouds slowly drifted in from the west, and I was disappointed at what this was going to mean for our holiday, but excited at the photographic delights it was presenting. At the time of taking this image, the drifting cloud bank had not completely blotted out the sun's attempts to throw light on the scene, and it was this mixture of diminishing lightness and increasing gloom that I found so compelling. A remnant left from our former blue-sky day was one thin straggling cloud, still picking up light from the sun, giving the image a strong point of interest.
We were in the part of Sutherland called Assynt, on the coast at Stoer looking over the Bay of Stoer, due west to the Outer Hebrides, the islands themselves invisible on the dark horizon. Later that day and for the next couple of days we were in the grip of a fierce storm of gale force winds and driving rain.
North-west Highland Place Names
The landscape of the North-west Highlands and the Gaelic language are intimately connected. Other languages have contributed to the richness of our place names, notably Norse, but the North-west Highlands have for centuries been a Gaelic landscape. In listing the meanings of place names I have relied on authoritative sources wherever possible. For further information about sources please refer to North-west Highland Place Names in the main menu.
Assynt; From the Norse Asaint or Asaint meaning ‘ridge end’.
Hebrides; The following etymology is quoted from the Wikipedia article on the Hebrides. The first reference to a name similar to the modern Hebrides is by Ptolemy, who called the islands Αἱβοῦδαι = Haiboudai in Ancient Greek. Later texts in classical Latin, by writers such as Solinus, use the forms Hebudes and Hæbudes. The old Norse name, during the Viking occupation, was Suðreyjar, which means ‘Southern Isles’. It was given in contradistinction to Norðreyjar, or the ‘Northern Isles’, i.e. Orkney and Shetland.
Ironically, given the status of the Western Isles as the last Gàidhlig speaking stronghold in Scotland, the Gaelic language name for the islands - Innse Gall - means "isles of the foreigners" which has roots in the time when they were under Norse occupation and colonisation, and in reference to the Norse-Gaels, known in Gaelic as the Gall-Ghaidhil (meaning Foreign Gaels).
Stoer; In Sutherland it is the name of a village, a bay, a peninsula, and probably most famously, as the ‘Old Man of Stoer’ a huge rock stack just off the coast. The Scottish Parliament website states that it is An Stòr in Gaelic and is derived from a Norse word meaning ‘large’. One might then ask, a large what? According to ‘Place names of Highlands and Islands in Scotland’ by Alex MacBain it is derived from the Norse word stor meaning ‘big’ and that it is commonly used as a prefix in place names. This makes more sense and implies that the name Stoer on its own is missing something. It may be that the name originally was applied to the huge rock stack that we now call the Old Man of Stoer. The Norsemen may have called it something like Stor Stakkr and over time the suffix was dropped as the name Stoer was applied to various other local features such as the bay, the peninsula and the settlement.
To confuse the situation further a Highland Council publication concerning The Old Man of Stoer claims that the name Stoer comes from the Norse word Staurr meaning ‘a pole’.
Sutherland; From the Norse Suðerland, that is ‘South Land’. It may seem odd that the far north of Scotland should have a name which means ‘South Land’, but if you were on Viking raiding party from Norway it would have been an obvious name to choose.
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