We arrived in Stornoway about 9.30pm and drove less than five minutes to our accommodation, the Royal Hotel that faces the harbour with Lews Castle on the other side of the water.
Our first day dawned and we planned to go north to visit the Port of Ness (Port Nis, in Gaelic) and Butt of Lewis lighthouse at Lewis’s most northerly point. The plan was to then come back south visiting places of interest such as the famous, Blackhouses.
There are not many roads on the Islands so getting lost should not be an issue even if you are not using some form of satnav. There are many road signs which are in Gaelic with English underneath. The many Gaelic speakers on the Islands keep the language alive, although they also speak English so one does not encounter any issues when out and about.
Port Ness is a small community with a harbour and because it faces into ‘The Minch’ (the sea that separates the Islands from the mainland) at the very north of the Hebrides, its small harbour has been designed to deal with the worst storms.
In autumn, the men of Ness still make their traditional journey to Sula Sgeir to capture young gannets, a tradition that is believed started before 1549 when the gannets were collected for food. Sula Sgeir is now uninhabited, lies 70 kilometres north of Lewis and is one of the most remote islands of the British Isles. We didn’t see any gannet on the menu so perhaps the trip to Sula Sgeir is purely symbolic these days.
A short way from the Port is the Butt of Lewis lighthouse that has been mentioned in the Guinness Book of Records as the windiest place in the UK.
The lighthouse was built between 1859 and 1862 by David and Thomas Stevenson on the cliffs, some of which reach 80 feet high. The Stevenson family’s involvement in lighthouse engineering began with Robert Stevenson whose grandson was the author, Robert Louis Stevenson known for works such as Kidnapped, Treasure Island and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The cliffs comprise ancient rocks known as Lewisian gneiss which date back between 2.6 billion and 1.6 billion years. We were lucky that the wind was benign on the day we visited so our experience of the windiest place in the UK was positive.
We then returned south and visited the famous Blackhouse at Arnol. We understood that this particular house was still being lived in up to the 1960s when the occupants were moved across the road to a small conventional style house. For hundreds of years people were living with their livestock in Blackhouses which had advantages as it made the dwelling warmer and meant fewer buildings were needed.
For authenticity, the peat fire was burning during our visit and you can see from the pictures that the smoke from the peat fire must have been a real health hazard. We understand that the fire was going all of the time so living with that every day and the animals in close proximity must have made the environment of the Blackhouse challenging.
That said, as there was no chimney, the smoke from the peat fire rose up into the thatch of the roof and killed bugs. It also made the smoke-laden thatch a good source of fertiliser for the fields.
We then visited the Gearrannan Blackhouse Village in the Carloway district which is a costal crofting village. Since 1989, the Garenin Trust has painstakingly restored the once-derelict properties and croft land to recreate an authentic settlement. Visitors can stay in the properties overnight on a self-catering basis.
Some of the properties in the village are open to the day visitor so that they can see the different interiors as well as some demonstrations of traditional crafts such as weaving the famous Harris tweed.
We then moved on the short distance to the Dun Carloway Broch. Brochs are among Scotland’s most impressive prehistoric buildings and these stone roundhouses date from about 2,300 to 1,900 years ago, and are found mainly in north and west Scotland. Probably built to reflect the prestige and status of their inhabitants, brochs were primarily dwelling-places for the principal family in the area. They would have provided some protection against sporadic raiding, but were not purely defensive structures.
After a full day of blackhouses and brochs we returned to the Royal Hotel, that just happened to have one of the best restaurants in Stornoway, for sustenance and a good night’s sleep.
Word and photos: Copyright John Cruse 2024