The Isle of Ulva’s community buy-out has purchased an even deeper kist o’ riches. The explorer David Livingstone’s grandfather, ‘Niall Beag’ lived on Ulva, deriving from Norse Ulvoy meaning ‘wolf island’, before leaving for Blantyre. Above his croft at A’Chrannag (‘the pulpit’), signposted on the Livingstone Trail west of Ulva House, lies a dark hole in the grey basalt clift called the Livingstone Cave, where, the story goes, the Livingstones lived while building their now ruined house.
It is Britain’s highest raised sea cave, 200m above today’s shoreline, and has been excavated by archaeologists from Edinburgh University since 1987. They carbon-dated the rubbish heaps, or ‘middens’, of shells and bones, deposited by Mesolithic and Neolithic hunter-gatherers 8,800 to 6,400 years ago.
Dr Catriona Pickard, who is leading the Edinburgh University team with Professor Clive Bonsall, said this year’s dig had revealed Bronze and/or Iron Age flints and a bone pin for fastening clothes.