Sodor

''Sodor? Sodor? Where on Earth is Sodor?''

Sodor is, or was, a bit north of Loch Tarbert on the Island of Jura and in the middle of a wet, windswept peat bog. No-one on Jura has ever seen or heard of it so why did it appear on the old maps until about 1650 and not at all after that? Well, it was there on the maps and after being there for about a hundred years it just went! Why was this and where in the world did it go, one asks? It also leads one to speculate; was it perhaps the inspiration for Brigadoon, that mythical place that appears every century in Hollywood legend, populated by kilted and plaid-clad beautiful people, all talking in suspiciously American accents? Or even the idea behind Gloccamorra, where Finian of Broadway’s ‘Finian’s Rainbow’ performed his Irish jigs, the forerunners of break-dancing? Both were, in fact, latecomers on the scene and not the first to float the idea of a mysterious, ghostly but romantic place in a remote and isolated part of Scotland. There are many mysteries connected with Jura, but this one at least may have an explanation!

Sodor was truly located on Jura in various ancient maps; first it was there and then it wasn’t. It was recorded in 1540 on a ‘rutter’, an early type of sea navigation chart compiled by Alexander Lindsay, possibly a Jura man. He was commissioned by no less a person than King James V to map the coast round Scotland so that the king could sail his fleet round the top of Scotland without hitting rocks or islands. He wanted to rein in the headstrong MacDonalds on Islay who were giving him grief at the time. This he successfully did, safely navigating the West coast thanks to Alexander Lindsay’s rutter. The MacDonalds were duly put in their place and never really resumed their importance. Sodor next appears in the Mercator (real name - Gerhard Kramer) map of 1585. He was a famous Dutch map-maker who came up with the ‘Mercator Projection’, a cunning dodge to get over the problem; ‘worlds is round, maps is flat’. There on his map is Sodor, skulking in its peat bog just north of the loch, in about the same place as it was on A. Lindsay’s map. Sodor again appears on a 1650 map by Johannes Jansson, another of the Dutch map-makers, but after that appearance, it was completely gone from all maps and forgotten about – but not quite.

The name
What about the name? Where does Sodor come from? Alexander Lindsay called it ‘Sudore’ which in Latin happens to mean ‘sweaty’. In Gaelic, ‘sod’ means a clumsy fellow or a fat fellow, and ‘sodar’ means a trotting horse. So the answer to the name Sodor obviously does not lie there, not in its meaning. One then comes to the vital clue! The Bishops of the Isle of Man, to this day, like to call themselves ‘of Sodor and Man’. Why do they do that? Obviously not so that they could be “of sweat and Man”!

The history of the mysterious Sodor
Doing some backtracking to the 1200s, the King of Noeway owned all the Hebrides and the isle of Man. At the Battle of Largs, which unusually for them the Scots won, King Haakon of Norway got beaten up and slunk off to Kirkwall where he bit the dust. At that time the Bishop of Trondheim in Norway had a parish or ‘See’ which included Greenland, Iceland, and the Northern Isles (ie. The Outer Hebrides). They were called the Nordereys. The bishop also ruled the southern isles, ie. The Inner Hebrides and the Isle of Man, called the ‘Sudereys’. The Isle of Man, having belonged to the King of Norway, but lost after Largs first became independent, then English. It did not take long for the lingual gymnasts to conjure ‘Sodor’ out of ‘Sudereys’. The bishops liked the name and have doggedly clung to it to this day but then there was a problem. Where is Sodor? No one knew or had already forgotten and the bishops felt a bit naked not having anywhere to justify their important sounding name. Various theories emerged – a popular one was that there was an island called Sodor in the Irish Sea, and while they were still arguing about it, the mapmakers were getting impatient. Until one day, I reckon one said “Oh let’s stick it up there” pointing at Jura and Loch Tarbert. They all thought this was a good idea and the bishops were pleased, so there it stuck. So that is what I think happened. They just parked it on Jura and hoped nobody would notice. When someone did come along to them a hundred years later and said, “you guys have got it wrong, there’s nothing there at all”, they dropped it off all the maps from then on, just forgot about it and the bishops kept quiet. But perhaps Sodor was indeed really once there. Alexander Lindsay was certainly no fool and, unlike most of the other mapmakers, it appears that he had actually been to Jura. He wrote that Corryvreckan was –“a depe horlepoole quairin if schippis do enter thair is no refuge but death onlie”. So he knew what he was talking about, even if he couldn’t spell. Maybe one day, somewhere on Jura, popping out of the ghostly mists just like Brigadoon, accompanied by eerie music, Sodor will briefly rise again. Then, in fear and alarm, someone will probably call out the Jura Fire Brigade and he would turn out if he wasn’t too busy being the coastguard, the harbourmaster or making whisky at the time.