Eorsa

Eorsa lay like a scallop-shell on the fringe of the western sea, its concave face opening to the wide ocean, the sunset, and the strung jet beading that was the line of the Outer Hebrides. 

The view from a fictional Eorsa — the novel Bridal Path, Nigel Tranter (1952)

Unlike Tranter's fictional Eorsa, the real Eorsa lies two miles east of Ulva, at the mouth of Loch na Keal. It is not a usual destination of choice on a Hebridean cruise. There are no legends or tales about it to entice a visit. There are no recorded massacres, no monks slain on blood-soaked beaches, or innocent families smothered in its cave. Neither are there any substantial ruins or challenging cliffs that might tempt a passing island bagger to its shores. The following photo is of Eorsa seen from the north. In the distance, you can see Ben More erupting—or maybe it's just a cloud.

Eorsa is a hump of an island—and a Hump it almost is. As defined by those who feel a need to categorise hills, a Hump is a HUndred Metre Prominence. At 99 metres, Eorsa just misses the mark. It is a roughly oval-shaped island, a mile long and a half mile wide. It acts as a barrier plug, a bulwark sheltering the inner reaches of Loch na Keal, a popular anchorage for the navy in WWI. The next photo is from Eorsa looking up Loch na Keal, with the ship Hjalmar Bjorge at anchor.

It seems odd that little Eorsa, near the monasteries of Inchkenneth and Iona, has no recorded early Christian ruins. The only ruins mentioned by CANMORE are two shielings, a kiln, and a building on what is now the site of a wooden shepherd’s bothy (NM 4884 3797). 

Eorsa has a place in Scottish fiction, sort of. In 1952, Nigel Tranter used it as the name of the island in his novel The Bridal Path—which was made into a movie in 1959 starring Bill Travers. The book tells the story of Ewen MacEwen, a widower with two children, living on the fictional Eorsa, which Tranter placed near the Small Isles. Ewen wanted to find a wife but was related to almost everyone on the island. He was encouraged to seek a mate on the mainland, and his week-long adventure begins in Oban. The novel is a good read as we go along for the ride with Ewen, who is mistaken for a salmon poacher and a sex trafficker. He is arrested, and after escaping from custody, walks from Fort William to Glenfinnan and then rows a boat to Eorsa via Muck and another fictional island, the dreaded Erismore.

The subject of inbreeding in a small community was a sensitive one. Tranter may have chosen Eorsa for the name of his fictional island because the real one was never home to a community. I began this post with a quote from the novel describing the view of the Outer Hebrides from Tranter’s Eorsa, one not seen from the real Eorsa.

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It was the spring of 2018. I was guiding a cruise on Hjalmar Bjorge, and we’d spent the morning on Erraid, an island I knew well. But I had to fake it as I led the group across Eorsa, an island I’d never been to. Fortunately, it was small, and nobody could get lost. 

We'd been set ashore on the rocky beach of a small bay at the east tip of the island, from where we started along a sheep track that led to the shepherd’s bothy. It was obvious that there had been something much older here. Several piles of stones hinted at collapsed structures, and a series of stone walls were a clue that earlier structures had been cannibalised to build them. Aerial photos of the site clearly show that they lie inside a circular path of green turf, about 130 feet in diameter, with the foundation of several other structures evident. It has the distinct look of a Christian Cashel.

It was late spring, and the thick bracken made seeing the ground around the ruins impossible. Also making it hard to explore were lengths of rusting fence wire strung atop the walls. Had these mounds of stone been beehive cells? Was there a monastic settlement here, a training ground for young monks from Iona to try their hand at isolation? There is no record of a monastic site on Eorsa, but it once belonged to the Priory of Iona. If not a monastery, perhaps it was a granary, as fields of lazy beds are scattered about the island. The next photo is of Ulva Ferry seen from near the summit of Eorsa.

We continued along the sheep track, which climbs across the hummocky terrain for a half mile to the cairned summit. Eorsa is said to be swarming with adders, but none were encountered as we made the gradual ascent to the high point. The summit was surveyed at 99 metres. The small cairn atop it was just a metre high, perhaps built to qualify Eorsa as a genuine, no-doubt-about-it, certifiable 100 metre Hump. The view westward from the cairn made the climb worthwhile. To the right, the basaltic pillars of the Ulva Castles were lit to an orange hue. To the left, low-lying Inchkenneth lay below the high, buttress cliffs of Gribun, which rise a thousand feet above the sea.

To blatantly paraphrase the quote from Nigel Tranter used above: Eorsa lay like a limpet shell at the mouth of Loch na Keal, its rounded summit opening to the Sea of the Hebrides, collonaded Staffa, and the hallowed shores of Inchkenneth and Iona.