The Viking Boat-Shed at Loch na h-Airde

Loch na h-Airde, Rubh' an Dùnain, Isle of Skye, Scotland

A man-made saltwater loch on the south-west tip of Skye, connected to the sea by a Viking-built canal. Submerged timber from a 12th-century longship still lies in its mud.

Loch na h-Airde — "loch of the high place" — is a small saltwater lochan on Rubh' an Dùnain, the long peninsula jutting south-west from the Cuillin into the Sea of the Hebrides. The peninsula is treeless, almost roadless, and reached by a six-mile walk along a stony coastal path. The loch is artificial. A 100-metre stone-walled canal connects it to the sea, gated by a sill of stone that becomes a barrier at low tide. The canal was identified in 2009 by a Glasgow-based maritime archaeology team as a Norse-period galley harbour, built between the 9th and 12th centuries to keep longships afloat and protected from Atlantic storms. Underwater survey of the loch bed in 2011 recovered timber from a clinker-built vessel, radiocarbon-dated to the 12th century — making it one of the few surviving examples of a Hebridean-Norse galley anywhere in the world. The timbers remain in situ. The loch is preserved as a scheduled monument. The folklore predates the archaeology. The Rubh' an Dùnain MacAskill family — a sept of the MacLeods — held this remote peninsula as galley-keepers to the chief through the medieval period. Their oral tradition was that the loch was haunted by an old steersman who could not leave until his ship was launched again. The 2009 confirmation that there genuinely was a buried longship in the loch revived the story locally; the canal cannot be cleared without disturbing the timber, and the timber cannot be raised without destroying it. The old steersman, in folklore terms, is stuck.