Lewis and Harris

I’d wanted to visit these Outer Hebridean islands off the north-west coast of Scotland for a few years now but the logistics were challenging: It’s too far to go in one drive so you need a night on the mainland either side of it; if you go in the summer you’ll get savaged by midges, go in the winter and you’re restricted by a sparser ferry timetable, your sailing at the mercy of some seriously unpredictable weather. I settled on mid-October – just before the end of CalMac’s summer timetable and hopeful of an easy crossing…

It started well. After a night in the Highlands the early ferry from Uig arrived in to Tarbert in bright autumn sunshine before midday, leaving me with the rest of the day to explore and photograph Harris, the smaller and more mountainous half of the conjoined islands. It was immediately appealing, a desolate and rugged landscape drenched in warm golden light, pock marked by dozens of lochans, narrow winding roads linking up the tiny townships that seems to appear almost anywhere when you least expected them.

Houses abandoned for decades descend into ruin virtually everywhere you find another one that’s lived in; cars and tractors, boats and vans are left to rot wherever they stop moving, and there are more telephone boxes in varying states of repair than you’ll ever find on the mainland these days. There’s a good reason why Lewis and Harris has been dubbed the Isle of Rust, and it makes for one of the most unique and interesting parts of Britain. Bear with me – there are 22 photographs in this article and I could have included more than that!

Within half an hour the weather had turned, an Atlantic front propelling biting horizontal rain across the inhospitable terrain with indecent force for much of the rest of the day. The golden light was long gone as angry skies lent the scene deep hues of purple and grey. I tried to stick to my hit list of locations for a bit but soon conceded that photography would have to wait until I came back to the south later in the week.

En route to find respite in somewhere to eat I stumbled across Sam’s Seafood Shack, a blue and white caravan tucked away high in the rocky wilderness, its wide maritime vista shrouded by the thick black clouds that pelted their contents sideways towards me. It was an early taste of what would turn out to be a typical scene, each one being as surprising as it was commonplace.

It didn’t look like it was trading though so I took a quick shot and got my fish and chips elsewhere. Indoors, with a view of the lively surf crashing down on the deserted sands at Nisabost.

Home for the week was to be a lochside hamlet called Grimshader on the east side of Lewis, not far from Stornoway. I arrived at dusk and settled in for a much needed rest, mindful of the fact that Sundays are still sacred in these parts and nothing would be open the next day. I’d already registered what anywhere else would surely be seen as a huge oversupply of active churches (92 for 26,900 inhabitants at the time or writing, or one for every 292 people), but that’s not my scene for a Sunday. A look at some of the abandoned whitehouses I’d seen on the drive in, however, was…

The term ‘whitehouse’ relates to the bright dwellings constructed a century or so ago as replacements for the traditional blackhouses (more on those in a bit), but many of them subsequently became abandoned themselves, the promise of modernity slowly losing its shine and giving way to rot and damp. A combination of people leaving the land, moving away for work, relatives dying and the Crofter Housing Grant Scheme allowing people to build a modern new home close by can all be posited as reasons. Quite why you would leave all your furniture inside is a mystery though.

The one above is at Arivruaich but there are many, many more across the islands. An early sun catches its crumbling white walls here, with each turquoise painted broken window inviting you to take a look inside to try and work out its story. Wood paneling falls of the walls, utility furniture still in situ, a range in the kitchen fireplace with a full bathroom suite adjacent. It was anyone’s guess, really.

A little further along the main north-south road at Balallan sits another, it’s roof caving in. Looking at the vista beyond, golden mountains rising up beyond Loch Eireasort you’d think somebody would be missing a wonderful view – but there were no windows on the side overlooking it…

North Lewis

The forecast was poor the day I head off up to the Butt of Lewis, but this was October in the Hebrides and fair weather isn’t often to be found. That said, a bit of drama is good for seascapes – just not so much when you’re perched atop a cliff face. I head off over the Barvas Moor and passed for the first time this week the shieling with the green roof that punctuated the otherwise vast and featureless terrain. Later in the week I would park up and fight my way through the relentlessly uneven peat bog to take the photograph you see at the top of the page, but for now I was just trying to avoid the heavy rain that ultimately didn’t materialise.

A late morning shot of the red brick lighthouse wasn’t ideal from a sun-directional point of view but there was precious little sun in the forecast, so the fact that it shines in this shot at all was welcome.

It was up at this northernmost part of Lewis that I first began to notice the number of old telephone boxes still present, still connected in many cases. Two Post Offices feature next, each with the classic and widespread K6 kiosks outside, and each of those reflecting the general state of repair of the building beyond. At Ness, a notice is pinned to the door detailing its now permanent closure. If you follow the Cross-Skigersta Road from there you’ll find the sorry ruins of the old Skigersta Post Office a little way along, perhaps foretelling the likely fate of its counterpart back up the road.

West Lewis

There’s a lot of history on these islands, from Norse influences to the Industrial Revolution, which I set off to find as I ventured along the west coast. As I drove in to Arnol I spotted a scene that encapsulated the essence of Lewis’s bizarre scrapyard chic, and was compelled to pull over to photograph it. A rusty abandoned shopping trolley flanked by an inhospitable looking bus stop on one side and a telephone box open to the elements on the other. Beyond sits an old parish notice board but it was devoid of any content.

Everywhere I went people had their washing out blowing in the damp and unforgiving squall. Streetlights were a mish-mash of rusting columns hosting a pick-and-mix of lantern heads, old and new, and at night casting a jarring patchwork of cool white LEDs, peachy sodium lighting and even violent deep oranges that transported me back 40 years to my childhood. And more abandoned houses. It was like nowhere else I’ve ever seen.

I rounded a corner to find an old coach rusting away silently in a field, likely having been parked up decades ago and never given a second thought…

I was here to see something more traditional, though no less quintessentially Lewisian. Arnol’s Blackhouse was something I’d like to have seen inside really but alas, it was closed for maintenance, so external photographs are all I managed. These low-rise thatched dwellings saw families live under the same roof as their livestock, one at either end with a fire in the middle. It was here that I first noticed the rich smell of peat smoke permeating the air, something that would become a constant through the week.

The sweet aroma added another layer to spirit of the Hebrides, its landscape scarred where the fuel had been dug out in lines, while stacks of peat bricks were evident in readiness for burning on the cooler autumn days. There’s a way of life here in all these quirks, formed over the centuries and not for changing with the 21st any time yet.

Arnol’s Blackhouse may have been closed but along the coast the Blackhouse Village at Gearrannan was very much open, peat smoke in the air and the rhythmic rattling sound of a loom in the distance. It’s well worth the small admission fee for a wander round, and a chat with the old chap weaving Harris Tweed (which is mostly woven on the Lewis side of the island) in one of the houses.

I would have liked a bit more vibrancy in this shot of the village but having waited a good hour for some light, it was clear that it was going to be another overcast day. And I had other things I wanted to see…

Like many of these island settlements Bosta lies at the end of a narrow road, and like many of these settlements it has a large cemetery overlooking the sea – rows and rows of headstones – but barely any houses anywhere nearby. There were a couple of highland cows casually wandering about, the odd visitor, and just out to sea was something called a Time and Tide Bell.

It turns out there are 12 of these around the UK coastline, their clapper moving with the tide to strike the bell in what must be rather an eerie way in a place as remote as this, like the ghostly call of a stricken vessel. Alas, the sea was too calm to sound it as it encroached on the beach around me. Even the sun made a brief appearance, casting some light on the piece in this long exposure of the incoming tide:

Further back up the coast and enjoying a livelier tide was a magnificent sea arch – Stac a’Phris – carved out and detached from the main cliff face by ferocious waves over millions of years. It’s a good 25 minutes’ walk from any roads but I was far from alone as I perched on the cliffs for an hour to capture the movement of the turbulent Atlantic, its turquoise swell crashing around the base of the Lewisian gneiss.

Somewhere along the way I passed another red telephone box, this one modified in a way I’ve never seen before, it’s double doors latched together with a simple rope loop. Hard to imagine what Giles Gilbert Scott would make of this take on his iconic design. It was in full working order of course and sat by a post box that’s unlikely to receive much mail…

Harris

It took until later in the week before I made it back to the south island, on a day that was forecast sunny spells but that – for the most part – didn’t deliver. It was at least dry though this time so we’ll pick up where we had to abandon the Harris circuit on the day I arrived – at an abandoned villa in Manish.

The ridged earth formations in the foreground are lazy beds, evidently disused these days as much as the house itself. Sheep roam freely, including this very striking one with curly horns that seemed curious about the visitor with the camera and perfectly happy to pose for it:

At the south end of Harris was Northton, a place I wasn’t sure what to make of either before I went or when I got there, but it’s an interesting and different part of the ecology of this coastline. Most of Harris is rocky; trees don’t really grow on the island; the relentless Atlantic winds whip over the land inhospitably, and yet a delicate area of salt flats – themselves a rarity – have adapted and thrived. Even with wellingtons the pools are deep and the earth too soft to wade through, and as I didn’t want wet feet I didn’t venture beyond the gaps I could jump across. The cloud still wasn’t for shifting but maybe it makes for a better picture than a blue sky would have anyway….

Carrying on along this orbital route around Harris, I ultimately arrived for the second time this week at Luskentyre Beach, hopeful of sunshine but at least grateful not to be blasted by sand and squally showers as I had been on the first. I spent some time looking for a composition in the dunes and was almost resigned to pack up and leave when I spotted a gap under the clouds on the horizon behind me. All it needed was for the setting sun to underlight the thick clouds as it dipped beyond the ocean. And it did – just for a minute, enough to make for a warm shot looking down the golden sands. And then it was gone again…

Scalpay

The final couple of images I’m going to share are from Scalpay, readily accessible these days via a modern road bridge but likely damned difficult before that was built. At Kennavay there’s yet another abandoned house, its rusty panels popping against a rare blue sky, while in the harbour the remains of a ship’s boilers sit on the tide line long after the bulk of the vessel has disintegrated.

The end of my week on Lewis and Harris came all too soon really, and having wondered at the outset if there would be enough to keep me occupied for seven days, I found myself in an all-consuming photography adventure that left me short on time and interested in more. There were other images I could have shared from the trip but I think I’ve captured the essence of this unique bit of Britain and am happy with the set of pictures I’ve got.

I left Tarbert in the sunshine on a delayed ferry, on what would unexpectedly be the last sailing of the summer season. All services the day after were cancelled as a ferocious storm barrelled in, and beyond that while storm damage was repaired at the port of Uig. My stop over for the final night was in Fort William where I finally arrived well in to the evening and in need of a rest, wet and wild weather now whipping round the bleak hotel. The drive back through the highlands the day after was beset with torrential rain but for the most part, I think I did well to avoid the worst of it.

If you’ve reached this point, thanks for stopping by! I’ll leave you with a typically Hebridean moody shot of the skyline-dominating First World War Memorial in Stornoway…

See you next time. 😉