The Bite Magazine - Spring/Summer 2021 - Issue 29

bitetravel feasting hall, chapel, tanist (heir)’s house and gok- man (watchman)’s house. Most of the buildings were restored in the 1900s, with the tanist’s house serving as the MacNeils’ family home. A well near the postern gate is fed with fresh water from an underground seam. Allt Chrysal’s monuments in Bentangaval were discovered in 1990 during the archaeological survey that preceded the building of the Vatersay causeway and its approach road. Excavations have revealed at least six phrases of human occupation of this ‘preferred site’ overlooking the Sound of Vatersay, beginning about 4,500 years ago. The first settlers, in particular, had a clearance of light woodland for growing crops and grazing sheep to create the open tree-less landscape seen in Barra today. These settlers worked hard to create two-level platforms on the hill slope - the upper was made of earth with a stone revetment at the downslope edge, and the lower, on which the 18th-century house stands, was created by tipping a large num- ber of medium-sized boulders here. They used pottery, including open bowls decorated with incised and grooved lines arranged in simple lin- ear patterns and made small tools from pebbles of flint, sharp knife blades and thumbnail shaped scrapers. A small township on the east side of Barra, Baina- bodach, has houses built on either side of a small stream that runs down the hillside, across a patch of marshy ground covered with sea-pink flowers, and into Loch Obe. A deserted village, the earli- est artefact recovered was a barbed arrowhead of flint dating around 2000 BC. In 1996, excavations found the remains left by ‘Iron Age’ settlers who lived here around 200 BC-200 AD, such as hand- made pottery and pieces of bowls decorated with incised patterns. Flint tools, including a small cutting blade and scrapers for cleaning skins, were also found. A few pieces of pumice may have been used for rubbing down animal skins to be made into clothing. It is considered that the lochside settlement may have been connected to the large stone roundhouse on a small island on Loch Nic Ruaidhe tucked away in the hills just 500 metres from the west end of Loch Obe. The once occupied blackhouses, made with stone but filled with earth, are now stony humps in the grass. In 1850, potato famine and overpopulation in