Butts, Brochs And Blackhouses

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...

Dun Telve, Dun Troddan

I left Sandaig Bay most reluctantly.... Sandaig, with its beautiful but tragic memories of Gavin Maxwell and Kathleen Raine...

... Sandaig, with its razorshells and coiled lugworm casts and enormous jellyfish (some of them 1 and a half ft in diameter) on the beach, and its rockpools, and islands, and hard clusters of baby mussels...

Before heading further north, away from the unspoilt, heavenly Glenelg peninsula, I took 2 more walks - the 1st in Gleann Beag, one of the loveliest of all the Scottish glens. Here you can find 2 of the best preserved brochs in the whole of Scotland, both within half a mile of each other. This is Dun Telve...

... and this is Dun Troddan...

Brochs are drystone, hollow-walled structures of circular design, found only in Scotland - mostly in the far north (lots in Caithness), and in the Northern and Western Isles. Their function is unclear to this day. Defensive forts? Places of refuge? Homes for those high up in the social pecking order? What's beyond dispute, however, is that they were built in the Iron Age - between 2000 and 3000 years ago. They're astonishing, atmospheric places (later I saw another preserved broch - Dun Carloway, on the Isle of Lewis). Another broch-visitor, whom I'd been chatting to earlier, suddenly called out from 50 yards down the road: "Look up!" 3 golden eagles were soaring majestically above the topmost crags of the glen, each in a different part of the sky...

For my 2nd walk I took an overgrown, little-used path which snaked north-east from the small watery settlement of Glenelg. First I battled through 7 ft high ferns (some plants seem to grow taller on this western coast - which is bathed in warm Gulf Stream waters). Then I squelched across high, boggy moorland. It was all unbelievably lonely and remote. I met no other walkers. Finally I joined a forestry track which led steeply down to Ardintoul on Loch Alsh.

Returning along the narrow strait of Kyle Rhea - which separates Glenelg from the Isle of Skye - I passed a solitary sailing boat drifting in the middle of the channel. Loud music blared from the boat and echoed round the hills - I think it was an Elton John song, played over and over - but I saw no one on board. It reminded me of the Mary Celeste...

I roamed through a paradise of wild flowers - tutsan, heath spotted orchid, eyebright, bog asphodel, ragged robin. A yellow mist of meadowsweet. A froth of purple-tinged wild angelica. Ravens cronk-cronked, oystercatchers piped and a stonechat flew out of a gorse bush. A seal barked from far away. Then the rain, which had been threatening for hours, poured down. I scurried back to the car under a dripping blanket of pines. It had been a tiring but wonderful day...