The Founder of Saddell Abbey - Somerled

One of the most important and least well-known figures in Scottish history, Somerled was born around 1113 in Argyleshire. Of mixed parentage, his father was a Gaelic chieftain, Gillebride Mac Gille Adomnan, and his mother was Norse. Although there is some contention on his ancestry, his father was apparently a descendant of the Royal line of Dalriada, whose dynasty had abandoned their ancestral heartland to the Vikings when Kenneth MacAlpin had moved his powerbase east to the ancient Pictish capital of Scone in the mid-9th century.

By the time of Somerled's birth, the Vikings had long been in control of all of the northern and western isles of Scotland, and great swathes of the mainland too. It is Somerled who is credited with defeating the Vikings and establishing the great Gaelic power that became the Lordship of the Isles.

Somerled had four sons, Dugall, Reginald, and Angus by his second wife, the daughter of the Norse King of Man, and the eldest by his first marriage, Gillecallum. Dugall gave his name to the Clan MacDougall, and Reginald's son Donald gave his name to the clan MacDonald.

The time of the Lordship brought a flourishing of Gaelic culture the equal of any court in Britain, if not Europe, which lives on to this day. Professional poets and musicians composed and performed original works alongside skilled and knowledgeable physicians, scholars, lawyers and artisans.

Somerled's success in the west brought him into conflict with the Scottish crown and was ultimately to lead to his death in 1164. In late 1163, the King of the Isles sailed up the Clyde with 164 galleys and 15,000 troops to Greenock. There are two legends about what occurred after he landed. In one version, a bribed nephew murdered Somerled and the army of the Isles dispersed and went home. In the other version of the story, battle was joined between the Scots and the men of the Isles and Somerled was killed along with his son and heir, Gillecallum. It is said that the army of the Isles returned to their homeland where they buried their dead chieftain in the abbey church that he had founded at Saddell in Kintyre.

The Abbey ruin today.

The History of Saddell Abbey

The story of Saddell Abbey is the story of the Lordship of the Isles and of the great monastic adventure which swept across Europe from the 11th century. These two historical movements were to came together in a quiet wooded valley on the east coast of Kintyre in the year 1148 to create the little monastic church that has survived, ruinous but still upstanding, over eight and a half centuries down to the present day.

The monks who built Saddell Abbey were not the first to settle in Kintyre, however. In the years following St Columba's foundation of the monastery on Iona in A.D. 563, missions were sent out throughout Scotland and new monasteries were established as far north as the lands of the Picts and as far south as Lindisfarne in the Kingdom of Northumberland. There were probably several monastic settlements on Kintyre, but little is known about them, or whether any survived the Viking raids which began in the Hebrides in 798. The decision by the kings of Dalriada to move Columba's relics to Kells in Ireland and Dunkeld in Pictland in 849 marked the end of Iona's pre-eminence and the beginning of Norse power in the area. While there is no evidence for an early Christian settlement at Saddell, the name itself is Norse for 'sandy dale', and indicates that Vikings probably lived there for a time.

The monastery on Iona survived the Viking attacks, and when the ancient Celtic monastic way of life was finally ended it was not to be at the hands of pagan warriors, but by a new form of monasticism which had begun in Italy during the 6th century. The creator of this new way was St Benedict who founded the famous monastery of Monte Cassino and there composed a rule for his monks which, over the following centuries, was to become the basis of all monastic life in western Christendom.

The arrival of the white monks at Saddell was just one small part of an explosive revival of monasticism throughout Europe at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries. The roots of this revival can be traced to the early 10th century, when the abbey of Cluny in Burgundy was founded. The monks there adopted a strict way of life based on St Benedict's Rule, but with even greater emphasis than before on physical denial. On entering this new, reformed order a Benedictine monk had to renounce the world, surrender all his private property and vow to stay in the monastery until he died.

This new and quite extreme monastic philosophy struck a chord with the men of Europe and they flocked to join the monasteries to live this radical and austere Christian existence. Indeed, it was feared by some at the time that the human race itself would come to an end should so many young men continue to choose to live the celibate life of a monk.

The three most popular of these new orders were the Carthusians, or black monks, the Tironensians, or grey monks, and the Cistercians, or white monks. The community at Saddell Abbey were members of the Cistercian order.