In 1098, Magnus III of Norway came buccaneering through the Hebrides down to Wales, where he stumbled across two Norman barons who at once gave him battle. One of them, Hugh of Montgomery, was clad all in armour but for one eye, but Magnus managed to shoot him through his peephole and the English fled, leaving Anglesey in Magnus’s hands.

On Magnus’s return to Scotland, King Edgar agreed to let him have any land separated from the mainland by a channel big enough for a fully-rigged boat. Magnus duly claimed all the islands to Scotland’s north and west, and even marked off a sizeable body of the Kintyre Peninsula, by dragging a fully-rigged boat across its neck on dry land.

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