The book Arran; - Cook Clan

EARLY ARRAN 15
decessors/ only taking advantage of their fellows by violence
where the civilised method is to do so by one's wits. They
had a wonderful facility in adapting themselves to circumstances
; island settlements might preserve their buccaneering
instincts, but in England they rooted in the soil, in Ireland
they were a people of towns. As they spun their web of
commerce across the Irish Sea, so they may have done across
the Firth of Clyde, and to this and their trading settlements
we may attribute the sprinkling of Norse names adown its
western shore from Cowal to Galloway, where again there
was a definite Norse community. And in Arran, too, was
the plentiful hunting which the Vikings loved as much as
the Feinne had done.
Once established in the western isles and along the west
coast, Norse dominion began to modify under the local
conditions. In the outer isles the population was more
distinctively of this stock, and the Hebrides were long known
generally as Innse-Gall, ' the islands of the foreigners.'
Argyll became Dalir, ' the dales,' and Kintyre in this connection
was counted one of the islands—for Tarbert is but a
' portage ' or land-ferry— ^but keeps its older name as Satiri,
Sal-tire, ' land's end or heel.' Arran, as we have seen, is
partly translated into Herrey or Hersey. In this inward
strip of territory we have a mixed population known as
Gall-Gaidheal or 'stranger-Gaels.' Such hybrid populations
are apt to be troublesome and unsure, and it is the Gall-Gael
of Argyll and its islands who were to make the deepest rift
in the western sea-empire of the Norse. Moreover, the
territory of islands was a lengthy one, like scattered beads
on a cord, and Norway, a single kingdom since the last
quarter of the ninth century, was within easy distance of
only one end. Centres of independent influence were bound
' The nominally Christian kings of Ireland robbed monasteries before them and
fought fiercely among themselves ; and there were local pirates in the Hebrides, as
Adamnan in his Life of Columba lets us know.