The Picts and Scots against the Norse

The Picts and Scots united against the Norsemen to form the kingdom of Alba, which had a Gaelic-speaking dynasty until Macbeth murdered King Duncan in 1040. Before Macolm III was killed by William the Conqueror in 1093, the Norse allowed his English wife to build Iona as a Roman Catholic place of worship.

Somerled, ancestor of both the MacDonald and the MacDougall clans, became independent overlord of Argyll in 1130 and he spent the next thirty years fighting Scots and Norse impartially.

King Alexander II of Scotland had driven the Norsemen out of mainland Argyll by 1222, so that the frontier was in the middle of Oban Bay for a time. In 1249 the King assembled a fleet in the Sound of Kerrera, to take the islands by force. Before he could persuade the Lord of Lorn– the MacDougall ancestor – to join him, he was taken ill and died near Horseshoe Bay on Kerrera. One of his last acts was to grant a charter to the Lord of Lorn for the parish of Killbride, centred on Oban Bay, within the See of Lismore, which had been separate from Dunkeld around 1200.

Fourteen years later an even greater fleet assembled between Kerrera and the mainland, said to have comprised nearly two hundred galleys and twenty thousand men. This was the Norse fleet under King Haakon IV. Once again the Lord of Lorn refused to join the expedition which ended in disaster at the Battle of Largs. In 1266 the Norse kings ceded the Hebrides to Scotland.

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