The remains of two distinct phases of human settlement are evident at Steimreway today:

• The former extensive township cleared in 1857 or 1858.
  
• The smaller number of families who resettled the village between the 1920s and 1940s.

The 1851 Census records 16 dwellings and 81 people in ‘the hamlet of Stimera’. Of these, there were 34 Nicolsons and 17 McMillans. By the time of the 1861 Census, Steimreway was totally uninhabited.

The clearance of Steimreway took place in 1857 or 1858 following a change in the tenancy of the Park Sheep Farm. This farm, centred at Valamus in South Park, had progressively extended its area northwards during the first half of the 19th century, resulting in the clearance or abandonment of many houses, shielings, or settlements, of which the largest by far appear to have been Lemreway and Orinsay (which contained 179 and 97 people, respectively, in 1841 but only 18 and 0, respectively, in 1851).

Stiomreway

The earlier clearance of Lemreway and Orinsay in the 1840s left Steimreway as an isolated ‘island’ of habitation surrounded by the sheep farm. The reason it was not cleared earlier appears to have been because, unlike the situation in other areas, the tenants of Steimreway held their land on a long lease direct from the owners of the Lewis estate, and could not therefore be legally evicted.

When the lease of the sheep farm changed in the 1850s, the Steimreway residents accepted an offer from the estate to give up their leases in return for crofts in the now largely deserted township of Lemreway. Seventeen of the crofts at Lemreway were settled in 1857 or 1858 by families from Steimreway.

The second half of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th century were years of increasing population and acute pressure for land in Lewis. While the Crofters Act of 1886 gave crofters security of tenure and prevented further clearance, it did nothing to make more land available for those without land.
Despite requests by landless families to make land available to them in former settlements such as Steimreway, the Lewis estate was unsympathetic. When the Park Sheep Farm was replaced by a Deer Farm in the 1880s, Lady Matheson detached Steimreway and Orinsay and leased these areas separately for sheep farming rather than allow resettlement of the land. During the 1890s there were land raids on Steimreway as in other parts of Lewis, but legal measures were taken to prevent this.

The Smallholders Act of 1911 gave the Scottish Secretary compulsory purchase powers to acquire land to create new crofts, and many applications for crofts in Steimreway were received. However, continuing resistance from the estate, under the ownership of both the Mathesons and Lord Leverhulme, together with other priorities during the First World War, resulted in no action having been taken by the early 1920s.

When Lord Leverhulme announced the indefinite suspension of all his projects to develop Lewis in 1921, a number of crofters pressed forward with their plans to reoccupy Steimreway. To begin with, there appear to have been at least 12 families preparing to settle there, but opposition from the Scottish Office and a number of accidents, notably the tragic drowning of two young men from Calbost during the transport of household goods to Steimreway by boat, meant that several families withdrew.

Eventually, five families resettled in Steimreway in 1922:

Donald Morrison (from 9 Calbost)
Peter Chisholm (from 9 Lemreway)
Donald Nicolson (from 16 Lemreway)
John Nicolson (from 16 Lemreway)
Donald Carmichael (from 26 Lemreway)

The 1922 resettlers were not recognised by the Government as official crofters, and no road or footpath to Steimreway was ever built. The new occupants nonetheless built houses (no doubt using stone from some of the former houses) and put land back into production.
However, given the difficulties of living without facilities available elsewhere, and with population decline and reduced land pressure in South Lochs during the 1920s and 1930s, a number of the Steimreway resettlers decided and were able to move back to Lemreway. By the time of the start of the Second World War in 1939, only the Morrison and Carmichael families remained. Mr Donald Morrison was the last to leave Steimreway during the 1940s, since when the township has once again been deserted.

Steimreway stands today like a green oasis between the moor and the sea. Its ruined buildings, and associated remains such as field walls, cultivation beds, and a well, are reminders of its former inhabitants and the often hard lives they led, both prior to the clearance of the 1850s, and then again for a period of some 20 years following the land raids and resettlement in the 1920s.

This article is based on an exhibition at the Angus Macleod archive, which is open to the public at the Ravenspoint Centre, Kershader, South Lochs free of charge 10am-5pm Mondays to Fridays or at other times by arrangement (tel 880737). The archive is overseen by the Islands Book Trust and Comunn Eachdraidh na Pairc.