One Friday morning I took the Calmac car ferry from Ullapool to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis...
Lewis is the largest and most northerly island in the archipelago of the Outer Hebrides or Western Isles. (Actually it's joined by a narrow isthmus to the Isle of Harris further south, so the two 'isles' are in fact one complete island - known as Lewis and Harris.) Most of Lewis is flat, featureless terrain, a plateau of peat stretching from horizon to horizon. Peat cutting has always been an important part of the island's frugal economy, and you can see now and again stacks of cut turves from the roadside...
I followed the straight western coastal road right up to the Butt of Lewis, the island's most northerly point. The landscape was desolate and treeless, buffeted by North Atlantic gales. It took some getting used to after the majestic peaks and troughs of the Scottish Highlands. At the Butt fulmars and kittiwakes had colonised the high sea cliffs and gannets divebombed the choppy ocean. (Amazing how the gannets' wings fold back just before hitting the water - perfect aerodynamics!) Here was an abandoned lighthouse, designed by David Stevenson, uncle of the writer and adventurer Robert Louis Stevenson, one of my favourite childhood writers, author of Kidnapped and Treasure Island and A Child's Garden Of Verses - and, of course, Travels With A Donkey In The Cévennes, one of the books which fed my own emerging wanderlust...
Travelling south again I reached the isolated crofting community of Arnol and its cluster of deserted blackhouses. Most are in ruins, but one of these long, low cottages is preserved in Arnol's Blackhouse Museum. It's built in the traditional way with thick, drystone walls packed with earth, wooden rafters and a thatch of turf and straw. See from my pic how the roof is roped down against the wind...
In these old crofting houses man and livestock shared the same space. The living room stood next to the byre - sometimes without a partition. The floors were of flagstones or compacted earth. An open peat fire burned in the centre of the living room, and the smoke percolated up through the roof. There was no chimney. This helped dry the thatch and killed off any bugs. Why were they called 'blackhouses'? Perhaps because they were dark and smoky places. Or perhaps because of a confusion between the Gaelic words dubh (black) and tughadh (thatch)...
A little further south I came upon the broch of Dun Carloway. (You'll recall my previous post on the brochs of Dun Telve and Dun Troddan...)
It was getting late in the day, and I still hadn't found a campsite in this barren and windswept wilderness...
