ABSTRACT
The contemporary memorial cairns on the Isle of Lewis are a community initiative and are created to recognize those crofters who agitated for land reform following the successive waves of annexation, by landlords, of established crofting lands and rights. By November 1887 the parish of Lochs, in the south-west of Lewis, had already been subject to clearance and the revision of land use such that villages lay deserted and the crofts were cast over to grazing. The artist Will Maclean has been commissioned, by community groups on the Isle of Lewis, to create a number of cairns that will memorialize the island's 'land heroes'. The 'look' of the monument references the historic building forms of Lewis. These commissions, from 1994 to 2013, were, perhaps, the most aspirational of memorial projects in the Gaidhealtachd for they employed the offices of an internationally acclaimed artist whose work is challenging and contemporary.
