Baleshare

Quality 0.50 · 1 view · Updated 2 months ago

Flat tidal island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland

title: "Baleshare" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["uist-islands", "tidal-islands-of-scotland"] description: "Flat tidal island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland" topic_path: "geography/united-kingdom" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baleshare" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Flat tidal island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox Scottish island"]

Field	Value
coordinates
location_map	Scotland Outer Hebrides
caption	Baleshare shown within the Outer Hebrides
GridReference	NF788619
celtic name	Am Baile Sear
meaning of name	Scottish Gaelic for 'east town'.
area	910 ha
area rank	54
highest elevation	12 m
Population	53
population density	5.8 people/km2
population rank	54
main settlement	Samhla
island group	Uists and Barra
local authority	Na h-Eileanan Siar
references
::

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/House_and_telephone_box_on_Baleshare.jpg" caption="The only telephone box on Baleshare"] ::

Baleshare () is a flat tidal island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Baleshare lies to the south-west of North Uist. Its economics and community were boosted by the building of a causeway in 1962. The 350 m causeway was built by William Tawse Ltd. The island is extremely flat by Hebridean standards, rising to only 12 m above sea level and known for its long sandy beach. The two main settlements on the island are Samhla in the east and Teananachar to the west.

Place names and locations

The name means "east farm" or "east town". The "west town" may have been on land that was said to exist to the west of Baleshare, washed away in the sixteenth century, over which it was possible to walk to the Monach Islands at low tide. The basis for this seems to be a reference in the Exchequer Rolls for 1542 that the valued rental had been decreased due to encroachment by the sea at some unspecified (presumably recent) date.

Archaeology

Two prehistoric settlements have been uncovered, which contain the remains of a circular stone house and pieces of pottery, bone and metal. In common with other sites in the area, they are threatened by coastal erosion.

Baelshare was chosen as one of the pilot projects for the Shorewatch programme, which aimed to training community groups to search for new archaeological sites and record information on them to be passed on to local and national archives. In the first year of the pilot project, 2005, the island was severely affected by storms. In some cases, up to 50 metres of the coast were lost in a single night. Between August and December 2005, up to four metres of archaeological remains were lost to erosion.

Notable people from Baleshare

John Fergusson, Nova Scotia politician.

References

{{RESAS
{{Haswell-Smith
Ordnance Survey. "View: Sheet 17 - North Uist - Ordnance Survey One-inch to the mile maps of Great Britain, Seventh Series, 1952-1961". [[National Library of Scotland]].
{{Gaelic Placenames
"Baleshare Causeway". Gazetteer for Scotland.
"Western Isles: Baleshire". BBC Scotland.
Jamie Beatson. (2007-05-30). "History at risk from erosion by the sea". [[The Scotsman]].
[http://www.sair.org.uk/sair3/sair3-contents.pdf Barber, John (2003) ''Bronze Age Farms and Iron Age Farm Mounds of the Outer Hebrides''. Scottish Archaeological Report 3.] {{webarchive. link. (2007-08-10 Retrieved 18 August 2007.)
"Vol 48 (2011): Aeolian archaeology: the archaeology of sand landscapes in Scotland {{!}} Scottish Archaeological Internet Reports".
(1874). "The Canadian Parliamentary Companion". Montreal Printing and Publishing Company.

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::