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One of the Isle of Lewis' greatest heroes was Neil Macleod or Niall Odhar as he is sometimes called. In the early years of the seventeenth century, Macleod and his followers bravely fought off a ruthless colonization attempt by a company of Lowland gentlemen known as the Fife Adventurers. James VI and parliament had granted the Lowlanders permission to use whatever force they deemed necessary for "ruiting out the barbarous inhabitantis" including "slachter, mutilation, fyre-raising or utheris inconvenieties." James had great plans for the Hebrides and the Lewis adventure was part of a larger scheme to conquer all of the islands, plunder their resources and put their people to the sword. When Neil sent the Adventurers packing in 1609, he spared the Hebridean people the horrendous fate described so succinctly in John Macleod's wonderful book Highlanders, A history of the Gaels.

The adventure failed: had it not, James VI would have created in the Hebrides what he did so devastatingly in Ulster: a "plantation" society of alien settlers, Lowland and English; the islands were thus spared "vicious" improvements, the creation of an aboriginal underclass, and centuries of racial hatred.

I have often wondered if Neil had been born 250 years later; would he have changed the outcome of the Matheson Clearances? Perhaps he would have inspired the land agitation uprisings of the Park Deer Raid In Lewis or Braes in Skye 40 years earlier than their actual occurrence.