Lewis in a Day

Lewis is very bare. Coming in on the ferry to Tarbert, I saw one or two trees and every here and there a house or two, and also the bridge that connects Harris and Lewis. There weren’t many beaches to see, just rock dropping straight into the ocean and marked clearly with a high tideline. The colours at this time of year are shades of brown, from golden to black, very dark purple, occasional green, and - in the right weather – a variant of blue for the sky and the lochs and ocean.

Lews Castle

It takes an hour on the bus to get from Tarbert to Stornoway, the main town at the other end of the island with one of my favourite place names. It was a brilliant chance to see the scenery as, apart from free-roaming shaggy sheep and the occasional little village, there doesn’t seem much else. The barren hills look like mountains, simply for their barrenness and proximity; there are barren moors with peat and heather, stretching out forever. You wind and curve and rise and drop. And suddenly, it breaks into a proper little town – not just houses perched on the land, but a town with a tangle of roads and buildings small and large, shops, houses, places to eat, and trees. There were lots of trees. The castle grounds, on the other side of the little stab of bay that prods the land here in two, has a wood on it with a golf course in the middle and (unsurprisingly) the castle looking across the other side. The castle was being repaired when I walked past it the next day, so I followed the walkway at the water’s edge for a while. Then it rained.

I had dinner both nights with a woman from Switzerland, who had been on the same bus and who was at the same hostel. (I had a tower of chicken stuffed with apricot and spinach the first night (honey-drizzled vegetables to accompany), and on the second night, tired after lack of sleep and a fantastic whirlwind tour of Lewis’ most renowned attractions, cheesey bacony chickeny pasta.) She is studying in Glasgow for a year, and has been on a few short trips – to the Highlands, to the Orkneys, and she was just drawing her trip around the islands to a close. Like me, she’s had a lot of rain, but has been even more constrained it seems by the public transport times, as it’s been the islands she’s been exploring on foot. “Do it in a car,” she said.

She came along with me on a tour kindly provided – and provided only on kindness (and in a car) – by the friend of a family friend who I’d never met. Having written some historical books on the place, as well as being a local, he knew his stuff and was generous in sharing it. He picked us up from outside our hostel in the rain, his little dog on the backseat, and drove us out of the falling weather towards the Callanish stones, where the sun decided to come out. The weather also was kind, and for most of the day we had sun.

The biggest circle of Callanish stones are perhaps the most famous attraction on Lewis, but those stones are but one of the attractions, and but one of the stone sites. We went to see one of the smaller circles first, a short way off the road simply sitting in a paddock with all around the yawning land of lochs and hills. Other stones, including the famous ones, were visible in the distance, along with houses and sheep and at least one tree. The stone itself is quite beautiful – Lewissian gneiss, a native of the island, in slabs, with the grain in it forming subtle patterns, and the glint of minerals in the light. They’ve found traces of pollen, we were told, from a time when the island had a softer climate, from a time around 5000 years ago when the people who lived here shifted these heavy chunks of rock and placed them upright in the ground, aligning them with the stars to mark time’s passage.

One stone in the first circle

The other stones – the ones with their very own visitors’ centre – are are arranged in the shape of a Celtic cross a little below the highest point of the hill where once a temple stood. In the centre is the circle, a small heart in the geometrical arrangement. Many of the stones here are bigger – though the largest standing stone on the island, which we later saw, stands solitary and dwarfs these all. The purpose of this largest stone is uncertain, though they have ventured a guess that it was used for executions, placing the criminal against it then pelting them to death with rocks.

Traditionally, with wood very scarce, the main material for constructing buildings is stone. We saw this clearly in both the Carloway broch and in the blackhouses. The broch was fantastic. With the walls partially recycled for other stone constructions, it gives a good cross-section, showing off the double walls. Signs of the different levels are still apparent, and you can walk up one of the partial staircases that still sits inside the space between outer and inner wall. Don’t bang your head on the low entrance way. It hurts.

Carloway broch

Blackhouses were the traditional and rather Vikingesque style of living on the islands – a building with all from beds to cows under one roof, but before you jump on the barbarian wagon, there were separate rooms and the structure was cleverly designed to allow people to survive in the harsh winters. The ‘barn’ part, which housed livestock in the barren season, was sloped down a little to prevent effluence moving into the wrong part of the structure, and there tended to be a hallway between the different spaces.

Arnol Blackhouse peat fire

However, it’s the peat fire in the centre of the living space and the thatched roof that filtered the smoke that are the most distinctive parts of a blackhouse. I got to see and smell and taste a peat fire going in the Arnol Blackhouse, a well-restored and rather authentic example of the way of living. It was impressive. I think it gives a fantastic example of the way architecture reflects ways of life, and in perhaps more than the ‘practical’ sense, for it was a very communal and social way of life quite different from the privacy and individual focus that we have in our society today. The chap stoking the peat fire (they were preparing for a group of school children coming in, and it was rather nippy outside) made the brilliant observation that this is where it all began – people, in whichever part of the world, whatever they look like, whatever they live in, clustered together around a central hearth fire.

For the houses in the village at Gearrannan, it’s moved a little more in the Western direction of tourism. These houses were inhabited until relatively recent times. The museum building shows a house almost, I believe, as it was when lived in. There’s a strange mix of new and old, with the cold floor and walls and one end and cute wooden furniture and covered walls, but still the floor is sloped, and there are still boxbeds built into the walls with curtains for warmth. Although the other buildings are becoming hostels and self-catered stay overs, it was nice to see a group of the stone walls and thatched roofs together, with nets and bricks to hold them down from the wind. It also had a fantastic outlook over a beach with crashing waves a little further down.

Blackhouses at Gearrannan

And certainly there were some fantastic beaches to see. Incredible beaches, with sand, and with patterned stones rolled smooth. Dalmore beach had wild surf, battering in on itself, crashing on the rocky edges either side of the little sandy bay. It put me in mind of Keats’s “eternal fierce destruction” – “I saw/ Too far into the sea,” he said. “... I saw too distinct into the core/ of an eternal fierce destruction.” But I had nothing of Keats’ sadness or despair, just his awe at the incredible power.

Dalmore beach

The beach at Shawbost

We visited a smaller calmer beach, where a freshwater loch sat on one side of the stones and the ocean at the other; the Butt of Lewis where the North and the Atlantic oceans meet and crash into each other; the lighthouse, with high rocks, where it began to rain. In addition to that we also visited an old Norse mill, restored as a school project, and a whalebone arch from the jaw of a large blue whale that simply washed ashore one day. How such a huge creature could simply wash ashore, miraculously lying there in the morning where there was no hint of it the day before, I cannot begin to imagine.

The jawbone of a massive blue whale, and the harpoon
that was in the creature when it arrived on the beach.

We returned to Stornoway rather tired, but in the wonderful way you get when you’ve enjoyed your day and seen splendid things. It was marvellous too to have been given the day, as I said, by kindness. I found my way to bed. Maybe I dreamed of the stones. Oh, how they danced, the little people of Callanish.