Welcome to the Uig Landscape Project

The Uig Landscape Project is funded by Historic Scotland and reports on a large-scale landscape project in Lewis, undertaken by Edinburgh University between 1995 and 1998. Uig is mostly covered by blanket bog and represents a landscape rarely surveyed in detail in Atlantic Scotland. The project commenced in October 2009 and will be completed by September 2011 culminating in the production of an excavation reports for each individual site. 

The initial survey identified 344 sites in the Uig landscape and of these four were chosen for targeted excavation. Three of the sites were selected as representative of monument classes rarely excavated in North Atlantic archaeology. These sites are Gob Eirer, a Late Bronze Age promontory enclosure; An Dunan, an Iron Age tidal islet comprising a causeway, an elaborate central hearth and evidence of later Norse re-use; and Guinnerso, a relict transhumance landscape, containing a 5.5m Holocene lake sequence, Bronze Age remains and a complex sequence of remarkably well preserved Medieval shielings. The fourth site is a dismantled blackhouse in the buaile of Bereiro.

Project Sponsors

Historic Scotland

Edinburgh University

Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland

Uig Estate and the Gearing Family