THE STORY OF THE BLACK STONE OF CREAG ASDUINN

October 21, 2025

North Uist, the Scottish Western Isles. The edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

The black stone sits on the flank of the low hill called Craig Hasten. Below the hill, the flat plain stretches away to the ocean, with open views all around across the machair to the far horizon. When you lift the stone here, you’re very aware that you’re immersed in the landscape, and the weather is never still. And there’s something about the hill that feels ancient, liminal even. You might not notice this if you’re in a group, but if you’re alone it’s there.

The black stone has a strange name. It normally goes by its Gaelic name Clach ‘ic Chaoilte, which in English is ‘the Rock of the Son of Caoilte’. It has a slightly older name: Clach na Chaoilte, but it has an older name still, that takes us right back to the start of recorded history.

It is also, by the way, the most mis-spelt stone in Scotland…

The other North Uist ultach stones are named after men known in recent history, and their direct relatives will even come out to watch you lift the stones their own people lifted not so long ago. The Gaelic word ‘ultach’ simply meant ‘weight’ in Uist dialect, although the word isn’t widely understood or used now; until the mid-1840s, weightlifting was central to the culture, especially on the western side of North Uist around Paible and Balemore, and men like Donald MacRury were renowned and valued for their strength:

“Bha Domhull a rithist math air togail ultaich, an sorach air gniomh neart am measg nan seann daoine”. (Eng: Donald was also good at weightlifting, the test of strength among the men of old).

There’s even an old Uist dialect word for ‘gymnasium’, where ultach lifting is named specifically alongside wrestling and weapon practice; suntais tigh.

After my last trip to Uist in September 2025, I asked around on social media for any local insights about this stone’s history, but this didn’t really uncover anything useful. Nobody knew who mac Chaoilte was, and the response was a resounding silence. Old memories died away a long time ago. So I set out to dig deeper, and what I found was truly astonishing. It’s a complicated story with many threads to weave together, and ultimately it ends in more questions. But follow me through, and the story shines a whole new light on the ultimate origins of stonelifting culture in the Celtic nations of the British Isles.

A Bit of History

The recording of Scottish Gaelic history suffered greatly from about the early 1600s, as the very survival of Gaelic culture came under threat from external influences. The experience of the Scottish Gaels was shared by the Irish and the Welsh, whose languages and culture were (are?) seen as backward, barbaric and all of that from the point of view of the more dominant English cultural perspective; it’s an unfortunate fact of history that this Anglo-centric prejudice also appealed to many Scots, Welsh and Irish who were prepared to abandon their own culture and history. For a historian, the job is often to separate prejudice from objective facts, to start to discern what lies at the roots of traditions and culture.

In any case, the impact of the steady decline of the Gaelic language in Scotland meant that there is little written history and literature from the 17th century onwards, and this has obscured the very rich cultural traditions that predate this period. The reinvention of Scottish identity from about 1822, and the romanticising of Gaelic ‘clan’ history doesn’t help either. As far as stonelifting is concerned, focusing too much on later clan history tends to obscure the deeper and older Celtic roots.

The Sennachies

So if we want to see further back in time we have to turn to the oral traditions, and in this sense we are lucky. In North Uist, the response to the destruction of Gaelic culture was for educated people to take on the task of literally embodying cultural knowledge in the ‘sennachies’, or ‘tradition bearers’, starting in 1625. In Ireland and Scotland, a ‘sennachie’ (Gaelic: seanachaidh) was a person professionally occupied in the study and transmission of traditional history, genealogy and legend; similar to the Welsh ‘bards’, who were far more than just poets – poetry was the vehicle in Wales for transmitting generational knowledge. The formal establishment of sennachies in North Uist likewise allowed knowledge to ‘follow the generations’ in an unbroken chain of people dedicated specifically to the task of preserving Gaelic history.

However, North Uist experienced massive emigration in the mid-1840s, as part of the wider Highland Clearances. This had the same result as An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) in Ireland, and resulted in the rapid demise of the indigenous culture, and the knowledge associated with it. This explains why in present day Uist, much of the old knowledge has been forgotten – the history literally left along with the people who carried it within themselves.

Aonaghus Iain Domhnullach

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to a man called Angus John Macdonald, who died in Sydney, Australia, in 1975. Angus was the last of the chain of sennachies, who had emigrated in the mid-1840s to Cape Breton, Canada. In a race against time in the last years of his life, Angus was determined to fulfil his vow to pass along to future generations the knowledge he carried from his ancestors, and he committed to writing most of the vast accumulation of oral materials he had preserved in his memory. This knowledge is what appears in the rare book entitled The Hebridean Connection, and it forms the basis of this story.

Without Angus, the history of the North Uist stones, and the link backwards in time to the wider culture of Celtic stonelifting, would be irretrievably lost.

Further Back in Time

But before we return to the story of the black stone, it’s important to note a couple of other facts about the entangled history we’re trying to make sense of. The total culture embodied in the sennachies, from 1625, has had a much longer period of generation, with two major influences being apparent:

The Norsemen controlled the Hebrides from the end of the 8th century until 1263. Although they are peripheral to the story of this stone, their considerable influence on Scottish Gaelic culture survives in the Norse ‘rolaistean’ (romances) recorded by the sennachies. Thus they’re part of the fabric on which this story is woven. There’s no explicit link between the Norsemen and the Uist stones, but who knows.
The other half of the legendary material recorded by the sennachies is of Irish origin, although details of the stories have changed over time to ‘localise’ the action to the Hebrides. The early-historic period Irish influence is of central importance to the story of The Rock of the Son of Caoilte, and it takes us back to the period around 600 AD. This was a pivotal time in the transition from old-Celtic to Christian culture in Ireland and the Western Isles.
The Christianisation of Ireland began in the 5th century AD. The new religion, with its emphasis on written scripture and monotheism, posed a direct challenge to the oral traditions and polytheistic beliefs upheld by the Druids. The modern reinterpretation of Druidism by new age ‘Celts’ is misleading at best and nonsense at its worst: in my opinion it completely and intentionally reinvents Druidism as a modern thing, with no real basis in historical facts. In ancient Ireland and Wales, the Druids were the intellectual elite of society, entrusted with preserving and transmitting the oral traditions that formed the bedrock of Celtic culture. They led society in the spheres of law, history, philosophy and poetry. The transition from Druidism to Christianity was not abrupt. Instead, it was a gradual process, characterized by a blending of beliefs and practices. Many elements of Druidic tradition were assimilated into the Christian framework, resulting in a unique syncretism that is still evident in Irish culture today.
In the transitional period we’re talking about here, Irish intellectuals would very likely have had one foot in the old Celtic ways, and (possibly) another in Christianity.

The Sages of the White Mountain

This is where it starts to get interesting.

The sennachies refer repeatedly to a group called the ‘Sages of the White Mountain’. Arriving in North Uist sometime in the period 600 – 800 AD, the Sages established a college on the ‘White Mountain’, which taught astronomy, logic, philosophy and other pre-sciences of the time.

The college is named Tigh Diocuil in Gaelic, after an Irish scholar-exile called Dícuil (c.760-825), who was a renowned astronomer, mathematician and geographer of his time. The White Mountain is Cleitreabhal a Deas, about 3 km east of Tighgarry, and the ancient ruins there include an aisled building from precisely this period.

The sennachies never mention religion in relation to the subjects taught at the Tigh Diocuil, and are emphatic that the Sages were ‘non-Christian’. The Hebridean Connection contains many long sections outlining the Sages’ philosophy, and it is very different to Church doctrine. Interestingly, the sages are known by various Gaelic terms, including daoine glic air a’ Bheinn Bhain (the Wise men of the White Mountain) and an Eigsidh (this is an obscure term, which I think means philosopher-magician).

History doesn’t record why Dícuil was exiled from Ireland, but it’s interesting that his departure and his knowledge align exactly with the demise of Druidism and the spread of Christianity.

Creag Asduinn

At some point in this early period, the Sages established a school teaching astral navigation on Creag Asduinn near Balemor – this is the same Craig Hasten where the black lifting stone sits. Known in Gaelic as an ealadhan (open-air school), the site was chosen for its wide views of the surrounding area that would facilitate instruction in navigation, and the sennachies record that the crews of Norse galleys attended the school due to the high quality of teaching.

We know that the Lord of the Isles, Angus Og, patronised and protected the Sages at Paiblegarry (Creag Asduinn) from suppression by the Church after the end of Norse rule (Angus Og ruled from1272 to1330); the inference being that the Norse rulers had no problem with the non-Christian Sages. However, the ealadhan seems to have been already well-established by that time.

In later centuries the teachers on Creag Asduinn are described as Irish monks, but as the same sennachie puts it, “there is no proof whatsoever as to who wielded power in those far-off times”. Or exactly when anything actually happened. Indeed.

Craig Asduinn has a long association with the supernatural, and is one of Uist’s sìth (fairy hills); in Scotland and Ireland these tend to be associated with pre-Celtic beliefs, and a thread of this superstition about Creag Asduinn runs through the sennachies’ histories.

Now fast-forward to the mid-19th century, just before the great migrations from Uist. It is well-recorded by the sennachies that a large black stone on Creag Asduinn was being lifted regularly as part of a well-established culture of lifting heavy stones in North Uist. Indeed, the immediate local of Balemore and Paiblegarry seems to have been central to this culture of ultach lifting, with several stones mentioned by name, including the now lost ‘Blue Stone of the Plain’ (Ultach na Liona) that sat right below Creag Asduinn, the Barley Stone, and the ‘Weight’ of Neil Son of Uis. Who knows, they might still be there…

The sennachies make it very clear that the black stone on Creag Asduinn is by far the oldest of the Uist stones – indeed, this is talked about as if it were common knowledge, and it is stated that the black stone was the decisive test of strength ‘for centuries’ (before the mid-1840s).

By this time the stone had a name and a legend attached to it. There are a couple of very similar versions of this legend, but essentially they are local extensions of old Irish legends linking back to Manannán mac Lir, and thus one of the fundamental origins of British Celtic mythology. I’ve added a version of the story at the end of this article.

The important thing here though, is that the stone is now (in the 1840s) named Clach ‘ic Chaoilte. In the legend, there’s no explanation of who mac Chaoilte was. My first thought was that it referred to Cailte mac Rónáin of the old Irish legends; the Fianna warrior and nephew of Fionn mac Cumhaill. This would have been a straightforward case of borrowing from one legend to tell another and the story would have ended there, but it turns out this isn’t the case.

Caoillt mac Earc and The Black Stone

It turns out the Caoillt (later changed to Caoilte) on Creag Asduinn was a ‘Superior’, teaching at the college established by the Sages. The date isn’t mentioned, but the sennachies’ references to Caoillt are preceded by an in-depth discussion of the Druids (very significantly, they are specifically named by the sennachies as na druidhean), immediately followed by thanks to Caoillt and others for saving the Gaels from the ‘dreadful worship of Odin’, and other Viking savageness.

So, this would put Caoillt in the period from the 800s to 1263, and I’m inclined to think it’s earlier in this period from the general context.

In the legend, the lifting stone is called A’ Chlach Dhubh (The Black Stone), before it acquires the name of the first man to lift it, or at least the first man to be associated with it. This is as far as the ‘historic’ story goes, but it raises intriguing questions:

Firstly, why was a teacher of astral navigation, a non-Christian ‘sage’, lifting heavy stones? In particular, why was he doing it specifically on Creag Asduinn, with its older pre-Celtic associations? It begs the question, what significance did lifting a stone in such a place have?

Secondly, from the sennachies’ histories, it’s clear that A’ Chlach Dhubh long predates the other Uist lifting stones. Was the culture of lifting imported by the Irish ‘sages’? It seems very clear that the tradition wasn’t imported from mainland Scotland, so how did this all originate and how did it spread locally, and throughout the Celtic nations of the British Isles?

Thirdly; there’s an interesting parallel history of stone lifting in North Wales, that seems to predate this story. Most of the known Welsh stones are in (or have been moved from) churchyards, and those that aren’t are in sites with associations to the Bronze and Neolithic Ages. Taking the stone at Efenechtyd as an example, the churchyard is round, which marks it out as a definite pre-Christian site (known as a Llan in Welsh). From what we can guess about the continuity of religion in North Wales, these were almost certainly Druidic sites. As the evidence starts to accumulate, it raises the question of why this association between lifting stones and these religious-cultural sites exists. What was it specifically about pre-Christian Celtic belief that saw significance in the act of lifting a heavy stone?

You could ask the same question about why Scottish lifting stones are alongside the coffin roads (rathad na ciste, or rathad na marbh – the roads of the dead), or burial sites like Dalreichart, with its very early historical associations. Was stonelifting in old Celtic culture associated with rites of death? If this was the case, then it opens up very interesting questions about whether British Celtic stonelifting has even older roots in the Bronze or Neolithic periods.

The Legend of the Black Stone

At the end of the great world, Creag Asduinn was in the Majestic Ocean on the flat plain of the sea. Manan son of Lir, King of the Ocean, resided in the Creag. On that particular day, Manan said to the son of Caoilte: - “Go and take the Stone of Destiny to Tara in Ireland; on your oath do not take longer than a thousand years or you will be condemned. A bandage shall be placed around your forehead and I will not listen to stupid pleas from you in your defence”.

The son of Caoilte set off for Tara, riding the white-haired horses of Manan son of Lir and he brought the stone to Tara. The men and women of Ireland were so pleased and proud that the Stone of Destiny came to them in the Peace-World and because the King of the Ocean chose to send it to them among all the peoples of the earth. Therefore, small for them was the kindness and honour they bestowed upon the messenger of the King of the Ocean.

There was nothing but music and dancing, banqueting and post-prandial oratory to invest the son of Caoilte with honour. Whichever way he turned, there would be a musical comedy actor and actress, each more professional than the last, engaged in ripe comedy in the Theatre of Refined Taste to amuse the people along the length and breadth of Ireland; and the son of Caoilte would be seated in the Royal Box. In the Sage’s grove, the wisest ladies and gentlemen would be engaged in mental disciplines involving dialectic, logic, philosophy, deliberating on metaphysics, ethics, mathematics; and the son of Caoilte would be sitting in the Regent’s Chair.

Between everything, the son of Caoilte forgot his promise to Manan son of Lir, so that a year and a day elapsed beyond a thousand years before he remembered that he had to be back in the Land below the Waves. Off he went without further delay.

He reached Manan. He apologised. The King was offended.

He said to the son of Caoilte: “You are condemned; a bandage is placed around your forehead; I shall not listen to stupid pleas from you in your defence. Get out of my sight and lift on your shoulder that black stone over yonder and place it on the topmost pinnacle of My Royal Residence.

The son of Caoilte cheerfully picked up the black stone on his shoulder; it was so light in the water. There is no doubt whatever, he would have placed it where the King had commanded but for one reason. Manan was so cunning. Whenever the son of Caoilte had almost placed the black stone on top of the royal palace, the king would drain the ocean and the black stone would come out of drowning and become so heavy that the son of Caoilte was forced to throw it to the ground. Then he would take a rest.

When the rest was over he would again pick it up and he would be off with it. The luckless fellow was thus alternately going around with the black stone and tossing it away from him for a day and a year beyond a thousand years and by then he was exhausted.
He fell to the ground and died. The black stone has not moved from the spot where it fell from the shoulder of the son of Caoilte that day. Therefore it is called the Rock of the son of Caoilte to this day.