Time Team
Mhairi the Viking
The fire crackles, a charred log clatters onto the stone hearth, but all I can hear is the sound of my father telling the saga of how I came to be born on this heather-covered island.
With its dark hills and woodland, Incailloch sees little daylight during the long Scottish winter, but our village and its lochside beauty can dazzle even in the freezing December moonlight. This is my home, yet I am forever reminded in stories, poems and songs that I belong to the Norse folk, that I am the daughter of a Viking. Together we sit in the firelight spinning and listening to tales of brave deeds and songs of war and of love, but it was not always so.
My father was but a boy when he joined my grandfather on a terrible raid of these shores and the loch's many islands. They came from Norway on their magnificent long boats, rowing across the North Sea under the command of King Hakkon.
From Arrochar on Loch Long the warriors dragged their galleys overland to Tarbet and then with horrible force attacked the undefended villages of Loch Lomond. The Vikings, or pirates as my mother says they should be known, laid waste to everything in their path, plundering the people's few riches and then making their escape by the River Leven out to open waters.
With his story over for the time being, I sit now in the light of the fire watching my father play chess with my brother, and again I wonder what made him stay. When his countrymen made for open waters my father was not in the galley, but never has he explained why he deserted the raiding parties.
My mother sits silently embroidering a zigzag pattern on the cuff of a new tunic for my father. She has adopted much of his culture, just as my father converted to Christianity to please her family. I have little experience of such things, yet as I grow older I become more and more convinced that my striking mother with her auburn hair and green eyes might well be the reason my father jumped ship.
Laying his tunic down beside the braes and hoes she has mended, my mother stops her work to run an antler comb through her hair, and I can see in her eyes that the saga my father was telling has saddened her.
The tale that he did not tell tonight is one of horror for his people and a fortuitous escape for him. No sooner had the Vikings reached open water after their raid of Loch Lomond than their heavily laden fleet was struck by a fierce south westerly gale that drove them ashore at Largs.
There they were stranded with no line of retreat and fell straight into the hands of the vengeful British troops. I know nothing of the family I might have lost in that battle, yet my mixed heritage fascinates me and often is the focus of games I play with my brother.
I have a roughly hewn wooden doll that I will dress as my father describes the clothes of my Norse grandmother. In her 'hangaroc' pinafore and under-dress my doll will fight the warriors my brother has fashioned from old wooden spoons. On summer days we play by the shore games of Blind Man's Buff taught to us by our father and tell tales of Norse legends and myths.
Yet at the foot of these dark hills and reflected in the still loch waters, we know we, the peaceable little Scottish Vikings, are at home here at the heart of Loch Lomond.