Celtic Era
The earliest written mention of the Outer Hebrides was by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in 55 BC. He wrote that there was an island called Hyperborea (which means "Far to the North") where a round temple stood from which the moon appeared only a little distance above the earth every 19 years, an apparent reference to the stone circle at Callanish. Pomponius Mela, a Roman-Spanish writer of the first century, refers to a group of seven islands which he gave the name Haemodae (Hebrides???). Other ancient writers such as Pliny the Elder, the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy, and Solinus (3rd Century AD) all seem to mention the Hebrides, attesting to some contact of the peoples there to the Roman world.
Little is known of the history of the peoples of the Hebrides before the 6th century as they, like the rest of Scotland, were in the depths of what centuries later became known as the Dark Ages. The first written records of the islands comes with the arrival of St. Columba in the 6th century AD. It was this Irish-Scottish saint who first brought Christianity to the islands in the 6th century, founding several churches.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Western Isles
Famous quotes containing the words celtic and/or era:
“I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, a plant, an inanimate object, indeed lost to us until the day, which for some never arrives, when we find that we pass near the tree, or come to possess the object which is their prison. Then they quiver, call us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Freed by us, they have vanquished death and return to live with us.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)