Second of two posts about travel around the Western Isles of Scotland,
drawn mainly from a trip taken back in July of 2007.
It's tempting to try to divide Lewis and Harris into the flat part and the hilly part, but since the hills already begin in the south end of Lewis before the boundary line, that won't do. The line is simply the long-defined boundary which originally demarcated the lands of MacLeod of Lewis from those of MacLeod of Harris.
Without going into the entire complex history of the three Clans of MacLeod, of whom the MacLeod of Harris are the most numerous today, it's worth noting that the lands most associated with them, on the Isle of Skye and its near neighbour, the Isle of Raasay, came into the possession of the MacLeods at a much later date. Also note that the formal titles of the clans do not exclude such variants as "Macleod," "McLeod," and "Mcleod" from membership, since such minor variations in spelling are common in many of the Highland clans -- particularly the largest of all, the Clan Donald.
At any rate, Harris is both hillier and rockier than Lewis, and contains a fair number of peaks rising to more than 1,000 feet (300 metres). It's also far more thinly populated, a natural consequence of the more challenging landscape.
Since there is only one through road connecting Lewis and Harris, and a limited number of branch roads, the best way to appreciate Harris would be to get out of the car and hike. A bit too rugged for this old fellow, though. It surprises me that none of the pictures I have from Harris feature any sheep, since the sheep, and their meadow muffins, are a regular feature throughout the Hebrides. The wool, of course, can be used to spin and weave the famous Harris Tweed, and indeed it must be -- since the name "Harris Tweed" can be applied, by law, only to pure virgin woollen cloth which is harvested from sheep in Harris, and then spun into yarn, dyed, and hand-woven into cloth in Harris. The tweed industry is still very much a cottage industry, with the work taking place in the weavers' homes, and is one of the main employers in Harris apart from tourism, which remains the single most important economic engine in all of the Outer Hebrides.
An important community on the eastern shore of Harris is the ferry port at Tarbert, with daily sailings to and from Uig on the Isle of Skye -- a crossing of 1 hour 45 minutes.
As you near the southern end of the island, you start to see some dramatic examples of rocky coastlines.
Before we start island-hopping, let's refresh memory with the map of the Outer Hebrides.
Base Map Attribution: https://freevectormaps.com/united-kingdom/scotland/GB-SC-EPS-01-0001?ref=atr
And with that, time to be moving on.
Q: When is a timetable not a timetable?
A: When sailing across the Sound of Harris.
The Calmac ferry sails back and forth across the Sound of Harris from Leverburgh on Harris to the island of Berneray half a dozen times a day in summer, with half that number on Sundays. However, the channel between the numerous rocky reefs and shoals in the Sound of Harris is both shallow and twisting, and the sailing times must be continually adjusted to avoid the times of low tides. In the Calmac timetable, there is a whole long list of dates for which you need to consult "Service Changes" -- in other words, days when the ferry times will not conform to the published timetable at all. Sometimes, in the Hebrides, you just have to roll with it. Here the ferry, MV Loch Portain, is shown arriving at Leverburgh.
In these pictures you can see some of the obstacles that the ship has to manoeuvre around. In a direct line, the ferry could sail to Berneray in 25 minutes or so, but in practice the crossing takes a full hour with all the necessary detours!
Once you're ashore on Berneray, there won't be any more ferry crossings for a while. The next group of islands are all separated by fairly shallow channels, and these are crossed by a series of causeways. The first causeway brings you across from Berneray to North Uist -- an island which is just as rocky and hilly as Harris. It's also just as lightly populated. In all, the six main islands in the Uist group hold a total population of just 4,000 people -- not much more than half the population of Stornoway.
From a tourist viewpoint, the most important settlement on North Uist is Lochmaddy, at the eastern end of the island, the terminal for the Calmac ferry to and from Uig on the Isle of Skye. There are a couple of hotels and B&Bs here, a museum, a store with an ATM, and other useful facilities. The ferry MV Hebrides is shown sailing into Lochmaddy after the 1 hour 45 minute voyage from Uig.
Continuing south, you cross another lengthy causeway, spanning several small islands, to reach the island of Benbecula. It surely must be a local joke to refer to Benbecula as "the Mount of the Fords" as the island returns to the flat, peaty landscape similar to Lewis. Similarity ends right there, though, as you are now in the beginnings of Roman Catholic country. Since Benbecula is the link between the Uists, it's fitting that this is also the island where the two religions mix and mingle to some degree.
Although it is possible to travel more or less straight through the middle of Benbecula, the road around the west side will bring you past many services in Balivanich, and past the Benbecula Airport which serves the entire Uist archipelago. During World War Two, this airfield was a major centre for anti-submarine flying over the oceans towards the critical Port of Glasgow, and the causeways linking Benbecula to North Uist and South Uist were built to support that activity. After the war, the RAF base housed many support services for the rocket test range on nearby South Uist. Although the RAF base here is now closed, there is still a smaller radar station in operation, and regular air services depart to Glasgow, Inverness, and Stornoway. Balivanich has the widest range of shops and accommodations which you will find anywhere in the islands outside of Stornoway.
At the south end of Benbecula, a shorter causeway carries you over to the island of South Uist, and now you are in Roman Catholic territory and no question about it. The proof? Just after the one main road down the island crosses over Loch Bi, look up the hill on the east side and you will see Our Lady of the Isles. The statue was commissioned by the local community led by the parish priest, after the Ministry of Defence proposed expanding the missile range into a massive facility with a military town and a plant for the construction of missiles, a proposal which (if carried out) would certainly have devastated the traditional culture and way of life of the community. The granite statue was dedicated in 1958. This picture was taken during a tearing rainstorm which lasted for most of the day, looking uphill from a parked car and using the zoom lens -- hence the fuzzy quality.
Here's an internet picture taken on a sunny day which does far better justice to Hew Lorimer's artwork.
Howard Teale photo.
That rainstorm, by the way, explains why I have so few photos from the two Uists. Getting out of the car without getting soaked to the skin was an impossibility.
As you approach the settlement of Daliburgh near the southern end of South Uist, you have two choices. You can follow the A865 southeast to Lochboisdale. This ferry terminal hosts sailings to two mainland terminals: Mallaig once every day, and Oban on a more irregular, limited schedule. As you would expect, there are a number of accommodation facilities around and along this stretch of the A865.
The alternative, going due south, follows the B888 to Ludag where one more causeway crosses the shallow water to the Isle of Eriskay. It's actually a common name -- there are a few Eriskays scattered here and there in Scotland. But this one has two unique distinctions. One is, of course, the beautiful old folk song commonly known as the Eriskay Love Lilt. The other is this island's role as the site of one of the most hilarious true war stories of all time. I'll meet you at Am Politician -- the local pub.
It's a pretty unremarkable looking modern building. But the name, and the artifacts inside, celebrate the ship of that name -- the SS Politician -- which ran aground on a reef off the shore in 1941, with a mixed cargo which included 22,000 cases of Scotch whisky bound for the United States. The islanders from Eriskay, and many other Hebridean islands, "liberated" a good deal of the cargo during the time when the crew had abandoned ship and the salvage workers had yet to arrive. The contraband whisky was widely and commonly referred to as "Polly," and a good deal of it made its way to many other regions of Scotland -- for a price. Many of the islanders were brought to trial on various charges, and a number were convicted and jailed -- but others had to be discharged owing to the startling shortage of clear memory among those called as witnesses. The whisky flowed so freely that some of the local population even began using it to wash their hands and scrub the floors, owing to the wartime shortage of soap.
The entire comic opera of the Politician took place during a period when the islands were suffering a drought of whisky due to wartime restrictions. These events formed the basis of Compton Mackenzie's 1947 comic novel, Whisky Galore, a multi-million copy bestseller which has been adapted twice for films, in 1949 and in 2016. Since the word "whisky" was not allowed by Hollywood's strict moral code of the day, the earlier film was released in North America under the title "Tight Little Island." American humorist James Thurber declared at the time that a much better title for the film would have been "Scotch on the Rocks."
This photo on the wall shows the pub when it was newly opened, with an elderly local man celebrating and toasting the new establishment. I can't remember for sure, but he might have actually gotten aboard the ship as a youngster, and the wreck was undoubtedly the source of the bottle he's sampling!
Nearby hangs a photograph of the notorious and unfortunate vessel herself.
In a glass display case stands a preserved bottle from the wreck, still sealed.
When I told the proprietor about my interest, she brought out from behind the bar an emptied bottle from the ship which they had refilled, and let me hold it for a photo.
And finally, a comical sign posted up above the window.
A short distance further down the road, you come to the made-to-order ferry harbour, opened in 2011, where Calmac crosses the short distance to the Isle of Barra, the last major island of the Outer Hebrides, visible in the distance. Before this five-times-daily link opened, it was necessary to wait in Lochboisdale for one of the rare days when the ferry to Oban departed from South Uist before proceeding to Barra, and then to the mainland. This multi-stop itinerary was a major operational headache for the deck crew who had to supervise the loading and unloading of vehicles on the ship. That limited service was also the reason why I was forced to stay in Stornoway over a Sunday on my first trip to the Outer Hebrides in the 1990s.
The corresponding landing on the north end of Barra is called Ard Mhòr (pronounced "Ard Vor", more or less), which is Gaelic for "Great Head" -- in the sense of "headland." It's near the northeastern corner of the roughly circular main part of the island. The island as a whole is dominated by the peak of Heaval, partly obscured in cloud in the photo above.
Not far down the road, between the Eoligarry peninsula and the ferry landing, is Tràigh Mhòr ("Try Vor", the "Great Beach" in English), a very broad sandy beach, famous not only as a prime source of the Barra cockles, but also for another unique distinction.
M. J. Richardson photo. The hard, compacted sands of Tràigh Mhòr actually form the three "runways" of Barra Airport, the world's only commercial airline service airport whose runways are underwater twice every day at high tide. Thus, the schedule for the Loganair 19-seater Twin Otter which flies to and from Glasgow has to be published, like the ferry schedule at Leverburgh, with footnotes indicating dates when the tide times will force the published timetable to be altered. Flights to Glasgow normally operate daily, twice daily in peak season. It's easy to see from the photo that the departing aircraft kicks up quite a plume of spray from residual water on the surface. I'm sure the plane has to be washed down back in Glasgow after each trip to avoid salt-induced rusting of the metal fuselage.
Sorry to say I had to resort to an internet photo; the one and only flight to Glasgow for that day had already been and gone by the time we arrived from Eriskay for a one-night-only stay in Barra.
That in itself was something of a mistake. Barra is an island which deserves more of anyone's time. The first stop off the ferry from Eriskay was the final stop of the Whisky Galore pilgrimage: the grave of novelist Compton Mackenzie at Cille Bharra.
Mackenzie was actually living in Barra during the war, and so was very much close to the action during the whole Politician farrago.
Cille Bharra is Gaelic for "St. Barr," and the name refers to the patron saint and founder of Christianity on this island, the Irish St. Finbarr of Cork. The word "Cille" ("Saint") devolves into modern English as the prefix "Kil-", so common in Scottish and Irish place names. The site encompasses the graveyard, a ruined old drystone church, and a small chapel and museum in a modern interpretation of traditional stone buildings, which houses religious artifacts and several ancient gravestones in the archaic Celtic style.
The "highway" around Barra, the A888, forms a circle of single-track road. Whichever way you go, around the east shore or around the west shore, you're going to end up at the south side in the principal village of Castlebay. Does this community's name really mean anything? Oh, yes!
Unlike such Victorian fripperies as Lews Castle in Stornoway, Kisimul Castle in the middle of Castlebay is the genuine article -- a medieval fortress, built in the 1400s, but on a rocky islet which is reputed to have been fortified for well over ten centuries.
The castle, and the island of Barra as a whole, are the traditional home of the Clan MacNeil of Barra. To preserve the castle into the future, the Chieftain of the Clan leased the castle in 2001 to Historic Scotland for an annual rental of one pound sterling and a bottle of whisky. When the castle is open to visitors, it can be reached only by a local boat. The boat's operator will likely take you on a quick spin right around the castle before returning to the pier at the end of your visit. Sadly, the castle was not open on this particular day in 2007. Sigh.
That photo of Kisimul Castle was taken from the terrace in front of the Castlebay Hotel, a classic old Scottish hostelry which provided us with comfortable beds and a delicious dinner in a cozy, friendly restaurant.
Like all of the Hebrides, Barra's natural environment in the lowland areas mainly consists of grassland, called "machair," which develops on the inland sides and sheltered areas behind coastal sand dunes. Barra, with its near neighbour Vatersay, has a particular reputation as an island of flowers, and the wildflowers of all sorts bloom on the machair through much of the year.
Not far southwest of Castlebay, a causeway crosses to the neighbouring isle of Vatersay, the southernmost populated island of the Outer Hebrides. Vatersay has a curious hourglass shape, and the narrow, low-lying sandy isthmus joining the two halves is flanked by a pair of beaches.The west beach, which faces the open Atlantic Ocean, was the site of a horrific shipwreck in September of 1853. The immigrant sailing ship Annie Jane, out of Liverpool and destined for Quebec City, was wrecked in the bay here after suffering disabling damage in a string of vicious storms. Over 350 people died; barely 100 survived. The survivors found little welcome as the islanders were not far short of starvation themselves. The dead were buried in two mass graves somewhere in these sand dunes; the exact locations of those mass graves are still unknown.
A simple monument on top of the dunes overlooking the beach commemorates the Annie Jane disaster.
Internet photo.
The drive back to Castlebay was a solemn one for me. I was thinking about all those impoverished human beings driven to try to seek out a slightly better future in an unknown foreign land, only to lose their lives so close to home in what might well be called an avoidable tragedy.
On the way back, there's panorama of the village of Castlebay from a height of land along the road to the Vatersay causeway. The prominent tower is the church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea.
Barra gave one of the few really good weather days of the entire trip, and I'd have loved to stay longer, but the tyranny of the unchangeable reservations for the ferry overruled that wish. The morning was all about early rising, since the ship was sailing at 7:00 am and it was necessary to check in at the pier one hour in advance. That gave no chance to sample the free breakfast at the hotel, alas.
The ship, shown here in a 5:30 am photo from the hotel, was the MV Lord of the Isles, one of the oldest ships in Calmac's fleet, and by no means the largest or the fastest. The crossing to Oban on the mainland took five and a half hours, making it the longest single route in Calmac's portfolio.
This is the same ship in which I crossed from Barra to Oban back in 1990-whatever-it-was. At that time, they still had overnight sailings on occasion, and LOTI (as the ship is fondly described by locals) still offered overnight cabins in those days -- the last Calmac ship to offer that amenity. Those were all booked by the time I made my reservation, and I got to sit up in a lounge all night, ending up with a massive case of jetlag that involved no aircraft and certainly no jet engines.
By the way, that "5:30 am" for the time of the photo is not a misprint. Scotland is a long way north, and the daylight hours in summer are far longer than the hours of darkness. Barra is at approximately the same latitude as Fort McMurray in Alberta or Petersburg in Alaska.
Unlike the long open-ocean haul of the Ullapool to Stornoway route, this crossing gives a good dose of scenery, as the ship sails out of the scenic harbour of Castlebay and then crosses the open Minch before passing down the long channel of the Sound of Mull, between the Isle of Mull and the mainland, and then across the mouth of Loch Linnhe by the Isle of Lismore to the harbour town of Oban. All of those sights add up to excellent reasons to spend a good part of the voyage out on deck, enjoying the views.
Here's the view of the rugged hills in the peninsula of Ardnamurchan, the westernmost point of the Scottish mainland. Yes, that really is the sun, for at least part of the second day in a row.
Across from Ardnamurchan, and off to the ship's starboard side, is the Isle of Mull, and it's quaint "capital" of Tobermory. The famous string of multi-coloured houses along the seafront can be sighted deep inside the sheltered harbour. At one time, the Calmac ferries to Barra and South Uist sailed from this port, until the ships became too large for Tobermory's limited port facilities. The name "Tobermory" comes from the Gaelic "Tobar Mhoire", which means "the well of the Virgin Mary."
The Isle of Mull is certainly one of the most rugged and wildly beautiful of all the Inner Hebrides.
At the eastern end of the Sound of Mull, the ship passes through a narrow channel between Mull and the smaller island of Lismore to enter Loch Linnhe. Here, you can readily see the fierce tidal currents which arise as the ebbing tide has to force its way past the lighthouse on Lismore to get through this narrow passage and out to the open sea.
Once through and into Loch Linnhe, we passed the newer and much larger MV Clansman which had just sailed from Oban for Castlebay. The interweaving of the two ships' wakes gave an unexpected moment of nearly artistic beauty.
And then we entered the harbour at Oban, the seafront lined with hotels of varying sizes. This busy fishing port and tourist centre is one of the largest towns on the west coast of Scotland. Oban is connected by major roads east and southeast to Glasgow and Edinburgh, south to Campbeltown and the Mull of Kintyre, and north to Fort William and Inverness. There is also a four-times-daily rail connection to Glasgow. Oban is the busiest port on the Calmac system by far, with daily summer sailings on many of the company's largest ships: a dozen daily sailings to Craignure on the Isle of Mull, four sailings to Lismore, daily sailings to Castlebay, Tiree, Colonsay, and Coll, and less frequent services to such other island ports as Lochboisdale (South Uist) and Port Askaig (Islay).
Driving off of the MV Lord of the Isles at Oban marked the final end of this tour of the Outer Hebrides.
Just to recap, here are a few final helpful hints for visiting these unique and magical island communities.
[1] Reservations! The Outer Hebrides are a dangerous place to try to travel without reservations, especially in the peak summer seasons. The ferries run full to the brim for days and weeks on end, hotels and B&Bs sell out, and even the drivers of camper vans need to reserve campsites. Plan ahead and reserve months ahead. Yes, it kills the kind of spontaneity that some people like to feel when travelling, but there really isn't an alternative.
[2] Foul Weather Gear! Whatever form you prefer, bring it. Come prepared for cold, heat, wind, rain, fog, and sun, often all in the same day.
[3] Good Walking Shoes! All of the most interesting sights in the Outer Hebrides require some footwork -- sometimes a fair bit of hoofing around. There are any number of hiking trails too, leading to amazing views which drivers will never see. On the often-rugged ground, flip-flops, sandals, and crocs can become an open invitation to severe blisters, or worse injuries.
[4] Eyes Open! When walking in these islands, keeping your eyes wide open is an essential precaution, as the meadow muffins (the "byproducts" of the numerous sheep) are everywhere. The sheep can be too -- and especially on the roads -- so keeping alert to the sheep, and their output, is a key travel skill.
No comments:
Post a Comment