We would like to thank artist Will Maclean for permission to use his evocative cairn sculpture in our logo, which commemorates the Aignish land raids over one hundred years ago. From the 1880’s, the people of Lewis grew increasingly angry towards an unjust and oppressive system of land ownership, resulting in a number of significant land raids.
In January 1888, a group of around 400 men and women from the Point Peninsula raided Aignish farm in an attempt to reclaim it for small-scale crofting. The government responded by dispatching a band of heavily armed marines to take back control of the farm by force in a dramatic confrontation. 14 raiders were arrested and given jail sentences of up to 18 months.
Despite the short-term failure of the raid, by 1905 the incidents at Aignish and many other places across the Highlands and Islands had seen public opinion shift decidedly in favour of the raiders. Aignish was divided by the government into a number of crofts for use by the people of Point, which are still in place to this day.
Joni Buchanan, author of 1996 book ‘The Lewis Land Struggle’ says of the villages involved in the land raids, “Lewis, down to the present day, retains a substantial rural population for one reason above all others,’ she writes. ‘It is that, at crucial points in the island’s history, its people were prepared to resist the power of landlordism and insist on their right to remain on the land which they occupied. It is largely thanks to the raiders that these communities exist at all.”
It is in that same spirit that the people of Point and Sandwick have developed our community-owned wind farm, the largest in the UK, to ensure that in the 21st century the resources of the land can continue to serve the needs of the local people. We are proud of the fighting spirit of the generations before us and were excited to identify the site of our offices, based in the Old Knock School (now known as Aros an Rubha), featured in the London Illustrated Press reporting of January 21st 1888. The original white school building can be seen on the picture below, directly behind the lines of marines and police reading the Riot Act to our forebears.
