A carving of a birlinn from a sixteenth-century tombstone in MacDufie's Chapel, Oronsay, as engraved in 1772.
The birlinn (Scottish Gaelic: bìrlinn) or West Highland galley was a wooden vessel propelled by sail and oar, used extensively in the Hebrides and West Highlands of Scotland from the Middle Ages on. Variants of the name in English and Lowland Scots include "berlin" and "birling". The Gaelic term may derive from the Norse byrðingr (ship of boards), a type of cargo vessel.[1] It has been suggested that a local design lineage might also be traceable to vessels similar to the Broighter-type boat (first century BC), equipped with oars and a square sail, without the need to assume a specific Viking design influence.[2] It is uncertain, however, whether the Broighter model represents a wooden vessel or a skin-covered boat of the currach type.[3] The majority of scholars emphasise the Viking influence on the birlinn.[4]
The birlinn was clinker-built and could be sailed or rowed. It had a single mast with a square sail. Smaller vessels of this type might have had as few as twelve oars, with the larger West Highland galley having as many as forty. For over four hundred years, down to the seventeenth century, the birlinn was the dominant vessel in the Hebrides.
In 1310, King Robert the Bruce granted Thomas Randolph, 1st Earl of Moray a reddendo or charter making him Lord of the Isle of Man in exchange for six birlinns of 26 oars.[5] A 1615 report to the Scottish Privy Council made a distinction between galleys, having between 18 and 20 oars, and birlinns, with between 12 and 18 oars. There was no suggestion of structural differences. The report stated that there were three men per oar.[6]
The birlinn appears in Scottish heraldry as the "lymphad", from the Scottish Gaelic long fhada.
^Rixson 1998, p. 30.
^Leslie Alcock, Kings and Warriors, Craftsmen and Priests in Northern Britain AD 550–850 (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Monograph Series, 2003), p. 130,
^'Broighter boat, circa 100 BC,' 5 May 2011, Irish Times: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0528/1224297912869.html
^See, for example, Caldwell, p. 145
^Barrow, Geoffrey W.S. (1988). Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 192–3.
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