70TH ANNIVERSARY OF EVACUATION OF EILEAN NAN RON - Part 2
Oral tradition cites the first to have lived on the island were three families, one from Melness, one from Kirkiboll and the other from Poole. Towards the end of the eighteenth century they found themselves there as social outcasts.
The Melness family, for example, had burrowed into the communal potato pit, leaving the community desperately short. Such an offence in a previous generation had carried the penalty of deportation to the colonies.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century the only remaining individual was a dwarf, known as Pipeir an Eilean. He had formerly been a piper in the Duke’s regiment. He had two daughters, one of small stature, Betsey, married, Angus Macdonald, the tallest and strongest man in Ceann Tuath. They were joined by five other families to settle on the island and raise their families. The others had found themselves displaced as a result of the Sutherland Clearances.
 In due course twelve families settled on the island, only six had crofts, which carried from three to four head of cattle each- the mainstay of the island being the herring fishing. In the early days, as was the case all round the northern seaboard, the boats were small, around thirty-five foot in length, and only the forehalf decked for accommodation. With these boats they went as far as Stornoway on the west coast and Wick on the east. The size of these boats diminished their earning capacity, and thus around 1870, the Duke of Sutherland gave the island fishermen a new and much larger boat. It was paid for in yearly instalments according to their earnings. An increase in the island population allowed them a few years later to purchase and man another boat. With the larger and better equipped boats prosperity grew. In time these boats were replaced by boats over fifty foot in length with a steam capstan for handling the nets.
Around 1905, the steam drifter came on the scene and the life of the sail fishing boat came to an end. Around 1910 the islanders chartered a steam drifter and continued fishing with this till after the First World War. It allowed a longer fishing season and eventually they ventured as far as the fishing ports of Yarmouth and Lowestoft. The resident island population thus rose and fell according to the fishing season.
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