We studied the population if Jura during the second half of the nineteenth century through the records provided by the national censuses and watched it drop from 1158 to 614 during the fifty years from 1841 to 1891. We know tha tmany families left the island, both to emigrate and to settle on the mainland. Much of the period during which this exodus took place is give the term ‘The Clearances’, in the Highlands and Islands at large. We must now see whether this description applies to Jura. Was Jura ‘cleared’ of people to make way for sheep and deer, and to allow the landowners to gain bigger incomes than those supplied by the rents of the settled tenants? Miss Campbell insisted to the Commission that nothing of the kind ever took place on the island. ‘Not one single family was ever evicted from their dwelling’ she said, ‘and those who left did so voluntarily, because they preferred to go.’

There are other stories from these times that say that there was some sort of clearance which is about the Cnocbreac eviction in the 1840s. Initially there were five families living there and later only one family was left. The others were relocated elsewhere on the island, in better housing than before, and under the same laird. This doesn’t sound like a clearance in the true sense of the word.

Many people who’s ancestors came from Jura, and who are now living far away from their ancestors homeland, have an interest in finding out where their ancestors lived, worked and who they were. Because of the mass migration many records have gone lost but there are still several sources where information can be obtained. If you are searching for your ancestors from Jura the following information, links and resources could be of any help. Providing you have done some basic research and have knowledge of your family tree, it is possible to access a complete range of Parish, Census and Statutory Registers in several places in Scotland to continue your investigation.

ScotlandsPeople is a partnership between the General Register Office for Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland, The Court of the Lord Lyon and brightsolid (formerly Scotland Online). ScotlandsPeople is the official online source of parish register, civil registration, census and wills & testaments records for Scotland. They are holding over 50 million records, making the ScotlandsPeople database one of the worlds largest resources of genealogical information and one of the largest single information resources on the Web. The website address is www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk

Jackie Davenport from the Argyll and Bute Council is the Council Archives and Administration Manager. She has a special Archives email address for Genealogy related questions. Your enquiries can be sent to archives@argyll-bute.gov.uk

Another interesting Jura Genealogy resource is provided by the members from the Jura e-mail list. By “subscribing” to this mailing list, you will become part of a loop of people who are researching their ancestors from the Isle of Jura, Scotland, and the related lines of their study. To SUBSCRIBE, send an e-mail to: SCT-JURA-L-request@rootsweb.com with the word subscribe as your message. you will receive a welcome message with instructions for sending messages to the list.

Below is an interesting collection of links to various resources that might be of help. The links are provided by Gavin, a regular visitor of this blog.

General information:
www.theargyllcolonyplus.org
A history of Jura emigration
Argyll Colony Plus
Gary McKay’s website

Some links to family trees/information:
Descendants of Alexander McDougald
Welcome To Clan Lindsay
The Kenneth Black Family
Journey to Jura by by Elizabeth Buie
Alexander McPherson of Jura

Jura Paupers Cottage 1910

The Paupers’ Houses The 1861 census records five paupers, all widows or widowers. It was hard for an ageing widow to be self-sufficient. Peat had to be cut, water brought from the well, roof to be thatched, etc. However, the community looked after those who needed help and stacks of peat have been built for their winter fires. The houses are now holiday homes.

The paupers are of course no longer there and the houses are now available as holiday accommodation but it still is interesting to see how the cottages have changed over time. When I saw the old image I tried to find a similar one of the current situation and found it on Uli Sauers Jura pages. When I sent Uli an email he kindly agreed to let me use it on the Jura blog, the result can be found below. An image from more or less the exact same spot, more than hundred years later.

Paupers Houses Today

These five images come from the brochure for the sale of The Jura Estates (64,000 acres) when they were auctioned by Messrs Knight Frank & Rutley in 1923. Besides Ardlussa House you can find images of the Tarbert hunting lodge, Lagg and two images of Inverlussa. The image I have included is from Ardlussa lodge. I have also included an image of Ardlussa House from 2008 just to show you that much has remained the same since 1923. The black and white image was taken from the east whereas my image was taken from the north and shows the view from the road.

Ardlussa House

For two years now, the makers of the island’s single malt have run the Jura Malt Whisky Writer Retreat programme in collaboration with the Scottish Book Trust to furnish authors with a nip of what Orwell consumed so deeply during the composition of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Three writers a year are invited to work for a month at the retreat in Craighouse, with a remit that their writing should address, however tangentially, the experience of living on Jura. The fruits of the first two years’ harvests — including works by Will Self, Janice Galloway and John Burnside — are now published in Spirit of Jura: Fiction, Essays, Poems from the Jura Lodge.

Will Self,who spent much of the 1990s isolating himself on Orkney to work, says “The great thing about islands is that they are worlds entire. They’re very appealing to novelists because they’re rather like novels themselves: they’re discrete, they have their own narrative, they’re fully apprehensible by an individual in a way a country is too big to be. The communities are different from those of us who live in mass society. They get into the habit of viewing the outer world as if it were a bit like where they are. They assume you’re completely alien because you’re outside the community and that the outside world is as aware of them as they are of the outside world. They’re full of foibles. We mainlanders joke about islanders being in touch with the fairies and so on”, says Burnside, “but on Jura there’s a very real sense that they are in touch with that aspect of things, to things that are no longer listened to in the bustle of mainland life. They remember their dead on Jura.”

Janice Galloway is no ‘Orwell fetishist’, though, so she didn’t make it to Barnhill, the house in which Orwell lived during his two years on Jura, getting only as far as the rough five-mile track at whose end the house sits. The same track, impassible by motor vehicle, deterred Burnside also. Orwell, he says, was one of the reasons he started writing fiction. But he didn’t want to look inside the house. ‘I’ve done that before with other writers and it’s always an overwhelming disappointment. I’d rather continue to imagine the room than go there and notice that Orwell’s trees aren’t there any more.’

‘I’m as much of an Orwellian as most people,’ says Self. ‘I’ve read all the books, I know about the life and the Jura connection. I was fascinated to go to Barnhill and to be introduced to the family who own it. But most places have a literary connection if you scratch beneath the surface. Jura’s is perhaps one of the most celebrated, but Orwell wasn’t writing about Jura, he was imagining a dystopic version of London.

John Burnside went for cross-island hikes with David Faithfull, who illustrated Spirit of Jura; with his amateur interest in the art of butchery, Burnside spent some time with the man who processes much of Jura’s deer for export. ‘And Stephen, the man who runs the newsagents in Craighouse, turned out to be a very good literary critic,’ Burnside adds.

The full article published in the Times Online is available from this link

But is there a fourth option perhaps? A more sinister and dark one? And was Corryvreckan the scene of human sacrifice? Gavin, a regular reader of this blog, sent me a couple of interesting links to another possible explanation for which I’m very grateful. In Irish Celtic Mythology the Monk St Columba established a settlement on the Isle of Hinba, there are various schools of thought on this, Hinba is Iona, Hinba is Saints Isle, or indeed that Hinba is actually Jura. And according to the Celtic mythology ritual human sacrifice took place in the north of Jura. The following link explains what could have happened:

The most dramatic of the Tammuz sacrificial deaths took place, not in the Mediterranean, but in the Whirlpool of Corrivreckan, located 50 miles west of Glasgow, Scotland. It was the only such annual sacrificial place in NW Europe and the ordeal was attended by thousands of people coming from as far away as Norway, Denmark, the Baltic region, Scotland and Ireland, even Russia. The island where they gathered used to be called “Hinba” from hinbasio (invasion). This name referred to the many people who annually arrived like an invasion to attend the sacrifice and to watch the life struggle of the young man in the coracle, which was anchored in the whirlpool, all observers watching in dead silence. From the high viewpoint at the far north tip of the island everyone could observe the tragedy. The cable with which the boat was tied to the anchor stone was woven out of the long braids that young women cut off for this purpose. It was a great honor to have your hair selected, and to this day, many women in NW Europe carefully save their long braids as long as they live for this purpose, even though the reason for this has long been forgotten. When the Benedictines arrived, the island’s name was quickly changed from Hinba to Jura, juramendu (cursed), from the most holy island to “The Cursed Isle” and a very determined, and almost successful, effort was made by the church to eliminate all evidence and memories of this happening.

There is yet another website with a similar account of this sacrificial place: “What these Inquisition members had witnessed was the last of the human sacrifices of the Goddess religion in western Europe, at least that is how the local people had seen it. Similar huge crowds had, centuries before, travelled to the north half of the Isle of Hinba (from hinbasio meaning invasion) when the northern Tammuz was sacrificed in the whirlpool of Corryvreckan, 50 miles west of Glasgow. People from as far away as Norway, the Baltic states and even Russia had annually attended that sacrifice. No wonder the church in Rome quickly changed the name of the island from Hinba to Jura (meaning cursed), when they gained the upper hand. Speaking at such a holy sacrament would have jeopardized a quick reincarnation for Tammuz into a newborn body, so the entire service was conducted in absolute silence. It is likely that something very similar was happening at Christ’s crucifixion.”

These two sites are not the only ones to support this theory. In the book “Odysseus and the Sea Peoples: A Bronze Age History of Scotland” by Edo Nyland and published on Google Books, is another interesting paragraph about the name Jura which I fully quote below:

The present name Jura is an abbreviation of juramendu, meaning curse, blasfemy, “the cursed isle.” The local people say it is a Gaelic word and means “deer,” of which there are many on the island. However, Gaelic had nothing to do with the naming. In the Saharan/Basque language galkor means “corrupting” which is exactly what Gallic/Gaelic did to the original language when it was introduced by Christian missionaries from Rome, and had even been manufactured by them, as explained in the more than one thousand year old Auraicept na n’Eccz (1153ff/4010ff), the operations manual of the Benedictine monks. The channel between the north tip of Jura and the Isle of Scarba is called Corrivreckan, from korri-breckan, korrika meaning tidal race and vreckan stands for Breckan: “Breckan’s tidal race,” the name of Prince Breckan, whose name folk memory preserved as a Danish or Irish prince who drowned in the whirlpool of Charybdis after having anchored in it for three days and nights. Adomnan, the biographer of St. Columba, writing in Latin some 60 or 70 years after the Saint’s death in 597AD, used the name “carubdis Brecani.” The name of feared Charybdis comes from Basque: karubdi’diz: “Vulgar death in the shining whirlpool.”

This is another case where Homer uses and adjective which is already part of the make-up of the name: in line XII:235 he talks about “shining Charbydis.” The whirlpool itself, which is located on the north side close to the shore of Scarba, was in Christian times give the Gallic name “Calleagh” meaning “the hag or the witch.” The place was holy to the inhabitants, so it must have been a Roman Catholic priest who named it. It appears certain that Adomnan had access to Homer’s Odyssey, therefore it is fairly safe to assume that Homers’s name “Charybdis” and Adomnan’s “Carbubdis” and Basque “karubdiz” were varieties of the name given to the whirlpool when the first missionaries arrived. It is likely that Prince Breckan drowned prior to Adomnan’s time, but after Odysseus.

“Breck” is said to be a Gallic word meaning “sandy” which supposedly described the color of his hair. However, Gallic had not yet been invented when Prince Breckan lived, therefore we have to look at Basque for a translation: barek-an, bareki (peacefully or calmly) suffix -an (in) and local legend indeed stresses the calm dignity which he, of his own free will, stepped into the boat and heroically accepted his death. He had to die; to survive, ad Odysseus did, would upset the planned resurrection and brought the return of spring and happiness, with all its blessings, into serious doubts. The top of the high hill on the north tip of Jura, which provides a panoramic view of the treacherous channel is called Cruachan, kru-aka-an, from krudel (cruelty) akabu (death) and (over there), i.e. “cruel death over there,” no doubt the comment of a visitor from the patriarchal outside. It is another name which must have been given by someone Christian or Jew who ovserved the sacrifice.

It was a death which was not nearly as cruel as nailing a man to the cross, letting him suffer in the sun’s heat and then giving him vinegar to drink. A short distance from the cave is a place called: Maol nan Damh, from ma-ahol-an-damuz, ama (goddess) aholku (to counsel) -an (inside) damuz (sorrowfully), the Goddess sorrowfully counseled inside. Theer is little doubt that this refers to the Chief Priestess following the dead prince into the cave, considered to be the womb of the Goddess, and after consummation of his immolation, seen by the waiting crowd as a light phenomenon, his spirit is released for resurrection (Campbell, 1959, p166).

The jeep trail giving access to this historic part of Jura follows the east coast. At the far end of this road was a still occupied croft by a small bay named Kinuachdrachd, a name said to derive from Gallic “Cean Uachterachd” meaning “Head of the uttermost part.” Again Gallic cannot be blamedm because it did not exist yeat. Instead it comes from Kinuak’dragat: “agitated they dregded the shore for the dead one.” This name is obviously an original from pre-Christian days. The old stone jetty which was built in the small bay nearby mus thave been used many times in the recovery of teh body of the sacrificed prince. Indeed the jetty may have been constructed especially for this purpose, it looks very old.

Whatever the truth, I found the information above extremely interesting and it speaks very much to my imagination. I know for myself that Jura will always be the beautiful and remote Island of Deer but I will never forget this story. From now on the names Jura and Corryvreckan, besides the many pleasant memories, will also have a different, a somewhat darker and sinister meaning. You are welcome to share your views on this fascinating story in the commment box below.

The site also holds a most enjoyable image collection with black and white photographs of Jura, like the on attached below. The photographs are mainly about the people who lived on the island and not so much about the landscape. I have spent a lot of time on the website looking at all the pictures which is great fun. This is a highly recommended website. Click here to visit.