To recap a little, my son suggested we join him for a few days going around the Hebrides, while his wife was at the Gaelic school Sabhal mor Ostaig in Skye. An excellent idea. You can read my earlier post in Part 1 which covered our lovely train journey from Glasgow to Mallaig, and a great day travelling round Skye, taking rather a lot of photographs. This post focuses on Harris and Lewis, a lovely place to be in a sunny week in April. Few tourists and the world around us was quiet.
This post will also be a few words with a lot of pictures. (I took hundreds..)
We spent the night before at the Uig Hotel where we had a lovely breakfast to set us up for our ferry trip to Harris. The dining room opened at 7:30 and we were first in the door. The hotel are very aware that many of their guests are going for the early ferry, so they are well geared up to give prompt service. The servings were generous. I didn’t do justice to mine, (I’m not the best ferry traveller…), but my husband certainly gave his ‘full scottish’ a good shot.
This was a larger ferry than the island hopper the previous day. Thankfully for me, it had stabilisers although the sea was calm.
The approach to Tarbert
Tarbert Harbour
Once we docked, the plan was to drive round Harris and then head to Stornoway for the next couple of nights. It was my turn to drive, so I was mentally prepared for single lane roads with passing places. On one in particular, I was very relieved we didn’t meet anyone!
Our first stop was Luskentyre Beach My camera doesn’t do justice to it. It goes on for miles. There are a series of beautiful sandy beaches across the Hebrides, although this one is world famous, and as you can see not very busy.
Both sides of the coast here have stunning beaches, across the water, is Seilebost, with yet another beach lovely beach, these photographs are taken looking across the water towards Luskentyre
We carried on around the island, right down to the very tip, to Roghadal where there is this lovely old church St Clements built from about 1520
We drove on round back to Tarbert via a very small road. I was quite relieved not to meet anything! Then we headed on towards Stornoway. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but Stornoway is a bit smaller than I had thought it would be. We had great accommodation very near the centre of the town, with easy parking just outside. The next day we headed off to sightsee round some of Lewis. Our first stop was the Callanish / Calanais stones .
The site was really atmospheric, especially at 9am on a slightly damp but really still morning. The surroundings were beautiful themselves
These standing stone sites always make me wonder about how there is so little knowledge now about how and why they were constructed. This one is in an area with a very small population, so even to get the labour to build it 5,000 years ago must have been really difficult. Because it was so early in the season the visitor centre was shut.
The guide book tells me that the centre stone would have stood 4.7m high. How the people git it upright with only primitive tools is amazing.
After Calanais we went to Dun Carloway / Dun Charlabhaigh, a broch or roundhouse dating from 2300 – 1900 years ago. It is one of the best preserved in Scotland. The only other visitors were plenty of sheep.
We continued to the Blackhouse village at Gearrannan. Here the tourist centre was open, and we had the opportunity to see inside the houses. There was even someone operating a tweed loom. (He must have been frozen…) The houses themselves just blend into the background, with their thatched roofs matching the hillside.
These houses were lived in until the 1970’s. It must have been a hard life. I can recommend walking around the houses, and I can also recommend the cafe – a huge pot of tea and home made scones! Some of the houses are available to rent. An interesting introduction to the way of life, but a lot more comfortable today!
After the blackhouses we drove round the north/western coast up to Port Nes, and then back towards Stornoway. A lot of the scenery was reminiscent for me of Northern Ireland, rugged coastlines and plentiful peat bogs.
Still bathed in lovely sunshine, we headed back to Stornoway for a wander around the town, The previous night we had dinner in HS1. The restaurant had been full but they kindly found us seats next door in the Boatshed restaurant, and gave us the HS1 menu. The food was great, but we were tempted by the lovely food going past us to customers in the Boatshed, so we had booked there for our second night. The food was indeed great.
We made an early night of it, because we had to get packed up, and we had a 6am start the next morning for the ferry to the mainland! Fortunately we were staying about 5 minutes drive from the ferry terminal.
If you would like to pin this, just click the image below. The picture is of one of the standing stones at Callanish / Calanais
Beautiful!
Thanks Caree – it is!