The Rudhach
Overview
The Rudhach is a volunteer-produced community newspaper serving Point, the district known in Scottish Gaelic as An Rubha, on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Launched in 2000 at the instigation of Point Community Council, it is produced for and by the people of the Point district — the residents of the peninsula east of Stornoway are known as Rubhachs, and the paper takes its name from them. The Rudhach is written largely by a network of village correspondents covering the district's villages, and it records local news, history, school life and family events. In February 2005 it was named Community Newspaper of the Year at the Highlands and Islands Media Awards. Its archive is kept at Aros An Rubha, the community hub at Knock, and the paper celebrated twenty-five years of publication with community events bringing together its readers and contributors.
The District It Serves
Point, also known as the Eye Peninsula, is a peninsula some 11 kilometres long in the Outer Hebrides, connected to the rest of the Isle of Lewis by a narrow isthmus about a mile long and at one point barely 100 metres wide. It lies about 6 kilometres east of Stornoway, the main town of the Western Isles, although the district of Point itself begins at the Parkend estate on Stornoway's outskirts. Point is home to around 2,600 people and is one of the few districts of the Western Isles where the population is increasing. Its seventeen or so villages and hamlets include Melbost, Branahuie, Aignish, Knock, Swordale, Garrabost, Lower and Upper Bayble, Shulishader, Sheshader, Flesherin, Portnaguran, Aird and Portvoller. It is a crofting, Gaelic-speaking district of small communities — precisely the scale of place for which a community newspaper, rather than a commercial one, is the natural form.
Launch in 2000
The launch of the district paper was instigated by Point Community Council in 2000, and it was supported by the Community Newspapers programme run by the former Western Isles Enterprise organisation. The programme's support was provided by Fred Silver, then a Point resident, who was a former editor of the Stornoway Gazette and later founded the island news website welovestornoway.com. The first edition was welcomed warmly by readers. One wrote that it was so good to see a paper coming out about Rubhachs, and that they were happy to read the place-names, history, news, information and details about the schools of the district that it contained. That response set the pattern for the paper's content and readership from the outset: a publication whose value to its community lay in recording the district's own life, in its own names and places.
A Correspondent in Every Village
The Rudhach's reporting model rests on its village correspondents. When the paper was named Community Newspaper of the Year at the Highlands and Islands Media Awards in February 2005, the chair of the judging panel, Gordon Fyfe, explained that the Rudhach had a correspondent in each of its thirteen villages, who ensured that no local newsworthy item went unrecorded and provided photographs from the past. That structure distinguishes a community newspaper from a conventional local paper: instead of professional reporters visiting a district, the district reports on itself. Many individual contributors, village correspondents and regular writers have helped to fill the magazine's pages over the years, with articles, stories and family events including new babies, weddings and anniversaries — the births, marriages and milestones that form the basic chronicle of a close-knit community.
Development and Recognition
The paper developed steadily in its first years. It did not appear in colour until the end of 2004, a reminder of the modest resources of a volunteer publication, but the strength of its service to the community was demonstrated within months, when it won the Community Newspaper of the Year award in February 2005. More awards followed in later years. The award judges' remarks identified the qualities that made the Rudhach stand out among the shortlisted entrants: completeness of coverage, rooted in the correspondent network, and a strong sense of place and memory, expressed in its use of historical photographs. For a paper produced by volunteers in a district of some 2,600 people, national-level recognition of this kind confirmed that the community newspaper model could achieve standards the wider media industry respected.
Recording Point's History
A significant part of the Rudhach's role is historical: it preserves the memory of the district as well as reporting its present. Its pages carry place-names, local history and photographs from the past, and readers have valued it as a record in which their own families appear. A notable example was the special issue devoted to the anniversary of the Iolaire disaster, in which more than two hundred servicemen returning from the First World War drowned when their vessel foundered at Holm, just off Point, on the night of 31 December 1918. One Point reader, D. A. Mackenzie of Aird, whose grandfather was lost on the Iolaire, was pictured studying the January 2018 anniversary issue and noted that his grandfather was named in the magazine. An article from the December 2018/January 2019 issue of the Rudhach, reflecting on the disaster a century on, attracted wider attention and was republished in full by a local church. Such coverage shows the paper functioning as the district's collective memory, ensuring that events central to Point's identity are recorded by the community itself.
Life of the Magazine
In day-to-day terms the Rudhach is a magazine of community life. Its content ranges across the schools of the district, church and community events, personal memories and reminiscences — such as the childhood recollections of Flesherin resident Nan Macdonald shared with fellow readers — and the family announcements that mark the passage of local life. Front covers have featured local children in fancy dress, and readers of all ages find themselves in its pages; at the paper's twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations, a five-year-old from Upper Bayble was photographed examining back issues with her grandfather and spotting her own picture on a front cover. The paper is also known away from print through its website, rudhach.com, described as the community newspaper for Point. The blend of the everyday and the historic, produced by volunteers who are themselves part of the story, gives the Rudhach a character quite different from that of a commercial newspaper.
Aros An Rubha and the Paper's Archive
The Rudhach's place in Point's civic infrastructure was underlined when the district's new community hub opened. Aros An Rubha, at Knock, was created by the volunteer group Urras Stòras An Rubha, which bought the former Knock school in 2015 and reopened the renovated building in September 2022 as a community hub run largely on renewable energy. The project won Best Community Project at the 2022 Scottish Green Energy Awards. Alongside a shop and café, a museum and exhibition space for the local historical society Comann Eachdraidh An Rubha, a meeting room and hot-desking facilities, the hub provides archive and storage facilities for the community paper, the Rudhach. Giving the volunteer paper a permanent archival home alongside the district's historical society recognised the back files of the Rudhach as part of Point's heritage in their own right.
Twenty-Five Years
The Rudhach marked twenty-five years of publication with celebrations that revived memories of its first quarter-century. The anniversary was marked with afternoon tea events at which back issues were displayed and readers and contributors shared recollections — one such event gathered the community to look over the array of past magazines, and a second was held at Ionad Stoodie in Knock. The coverage of the anniversary in the island press revisited the paper's beginnings in 2000, its first colour editions, its 2005 award and the contributions of the many correspondents and writers who had filled its pages. That a volunteer community paper should survive for twenty-five years, in a period when many commercial local newspapers contracted or closed, testifies to the strength of the model on which it was founded: a community council's initiative, professional support at the outset, and a network of villagers willing to write their own district's news.
Place in Island Media
Within the media landscape of the Western Isles, the Rudhach occupies a distinctive niche. The islands are served by the Stornoway Gazette, the historic weekly for Lewis, and by island-wide online outlets, but the Rudhach operates at the level below these: a single district of some 2,600 people, covered village by village. Its survival and its awards demonstrate the continuing value of hyperlocal journalism produced by the community it serves. As a volunteer publication with a correspondent in every village, an archive housed in the district's community hub, and a readership that appears in its own pages, the Rudhach is both a newspaper and a community institution — a record of An Rubha written by the Rubhachs themselves.
