Gaelic Song from the Isle of Lewis - An Clachan

This song was inspired by the many deserted villages around the islands. In particular a small settlement on the Pentland road near Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. The village is situated above where the Pentland and Achmore roads branch, near loch Vatandip. On the OS map, it is on a hillside named "Ben Hulabie." An old acquaintance, originally from the district of Ness (Chirstidh Pluc, Manner Park), now long dead, told me that she had known people from there in her youth. She also knew the correct name of the village, which unfortunately I have forgotten. When I walked up to the houses to take some pictures to go with the song, they looked too small to be regular dwellings and so it may have been a village of airighean. Until the First World War, people from the Islands and some other places is the Highlands generally lived by the sea in the winter, and drove their cattle up to the summer pastures in better weather. Airigh is the Gaelic name for this summer abode. Much fun was had during these times and there were songs and hymns (now lost) to mark the journey. People continued to use them to live while they cut their peats in the summer until around 1980. The area around the old village was particularly used by people from the Point district of Lewis. It is interesting to see the cars on the road below drive past not even noticing the place where a whole community once lived and people were born and died. There are many such places in the Hebrides, some abandoned due to depopulation and some cleared on the orders of landlords. There are some other pictures of "tobhtaichean" from the same road also in the video as well as some general pictures around the Islands and historic photographs of the era from old postcards.