Finlay MacLeod, champion of the Gaelic language and culture – obituary

Finlay MacLeod, who has died aged 86, was born into a Gaelic-speaking crofting community on the Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis and devoted his life to studying Gaelic life in the Western Isles and preserving Gaelic language and culture.

Born at Adabroc in Ness, the northernmost part of the Isle of Lewis, in May 1937, Finlay MacLeod resented being taught in English at school and left aged 15 to go to sea.

After National Service in the RAF at the radar station in Uig, he became a fireman in London, studying for A-levels at evening classes. He went on to take a degree and doctorate in psychology at Aberdeen University, and spent a decade there as a lecturer, also writing plays in Gaelic.

Returning to Lewis, he settled at Shawbost on the west side of the Island and worked for a year as a primary school teacher before being appointed deputy director of education at the newly formed Western Isles Council (now the Comhairle nan Eilean Siar).

He was instrumental in the founding of the Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Scotland’s Gaelic college on Skye, and promoted teaching in Gaelic in Western Isles schools, persuading the council to create a publishing company to produce learning resources for children.

He also co-ordinated a feasibility study which led to the establishment of a community education project, which supported a raft of initiatives including historical societies and a play-group movement.

MacLeod himself became an expert on all aspects of Gaelic language and history, including chapels, healing wells, place names, the Lewis Chessmen, archaeology, the Clearances and land struggles, and the place of religion and education in communities.

As well as giving lectures and conducting guided tours of historic sites, MacLeod became involved in Gaelic broadcasting, producing and presenting programmes on radio and television.

His books, published in both Gaelic and English, included The Chapels and Healing Wells of the Western Isles; The Norse Mills of Lewis; and Mac an t-Srònaich, about the 19th-century fugitive from justice on the Isle of Lewis, whose crimes, much embellished in folklore, made him a bogeyman to generations of Lewis children. 

MacLeod also edited Togail Tir, Marking Time (1989), containing his archive of maps of the Outer Hebrides, which went on display at the National Library of Scotland. He collaborated with Anne Campbell and others on Rathad an Isein: A Lewis Moorland Glossary a “counter-desecration phrasebook” containing a list of more than 100 Gaelic terms for aspects of peat and peat culture. The book helped to inspire the author Robert Macfarlane to write his bestselling Landmarks (2015), an attempt to reverse the “culling of words concerning nature” by dictionary compilers, and the displacement of “the outdoor and the natural... by the indoor and the virtual”.

They collaborated on Macfarlane’s online “Word of the Day” which rehabilitates lost words from all over the British Isles, Gaelic examples including “èit” – “the practice of placing quartz stones in streams so they sparkle in moonlight & thereby attract salmon to them in late summer and autumn”; “caochan”– “a slender moor-stream obscured by vegetation”, and “rionnach maoim” – “shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day”.

The poet John Burnside observed that MacLeod’s glossary was a vital weapon when Lewis Islanders fought off a proposal to build 234 giant wind turbines, showing that the island’s peat moorland was so much more than the “unproductive wilderness” described by the scheme’s supporters.

In 2017 MacLeod won the Scottish Daily Record’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to Gaelic language and culture over the years.

 Finlay MacLeod is survived by his wife Norma and by two daughters.

Finlay MacLeod, born May 1937, died November 3 2023