Lewis

Lewis and Harris form the majority of the Outer Hebrides landmass. The landscape here is very weird - it consists of lumps and fingers of gneiss rock, filled with inland lakes and intruded upon by sea lakes, and covered all over with boggy peat, which grows so thick it can bury structures within a few hundred years. Few people live here now - but for the stone age people 4000 years ago, the lack of full tree cover and the easy access to both fresh water and sea resources made it (and Orkney) ideal. Stone Age civilisation flourished here. Our civilisation is not doing quite as well. 

Until the 1950s, many people here still lived in what they call 'blackhouses', which are stone buildings with peat fires inside, no insulation, and straw roofs. There's still a few ones left, now museums, to give you an idea of what it was like: not very nice. After WW2 the government began moving people out of them and into newer pebbledash houses, which are ugly but probably a lot more healthy to live in. The remains of blackhouses dot the landscape around villages - they are often right next to the newer house.

I spent 2 days driving around Lewis and saw a lot of small villages, with miles and miles of winding road stretching through peat moorland in between. Sheep and cattle roam free, all over the roads, tagged so their owners can find them with GPS if they go missing. (I saw some sheep in really odd places.) The views are bleak, but sometimes amazing. The ever-changing weather allows for many rainbows, and strange moments where it is dark and gloomy in two places within view, but then the water shines clear blue and the mountains glow in two others, as fast fronts come in from the Atlantic and then disappear within half an hour. 

One one walk I met a local ranger whose job was trapping mink. Apparently some peabrain ran a mink farm here in the 60s, and when he abandoned it, he let them all go. At one time there were thousands, decimating local birdlife. They were mostly under control, which gave the government an excuse the cut the control programme funding, so now they are coming back again. It was ever thus. He showed me a dead mink, but most of his traps were empty at the place we visited. 

The temperance movement really did its job up here. Stornoway itself has pubs, but there are scarce few elsewhere. The village community centres (also the library, historical society, medical centre, post office and shop) are the real heart of life here. I went to four of them all up. The last was at Balannan, near where Clan MacKenzie of Seaforth once ruled the Lordship of the Isles for a few hundred years, late in the piece. I went to see the monument where my (adopted) ancestral seat once was. It's a ruin, like so many things here. That was around the time when the loneliness kicked in, the bleak scenery got all a bit much, and I made it back to Stornoway for an early dinner and some time off. 

Many place names are Viking in origin - Stornoway, Carloway, Shawbost, Leurbost, and so on - but there is little of their archaeology left, just a recreation of an old mill. There is one Iron Age house - barely recognisable under the peat, and an Iron Age Broch - but no Roman, no Anglo-Saxon and hardly any medieval stuff either. There are surfers, hippies, dreamers, croft farmers...and me. It was fun, but I would not live here. I am not a stone age hunter, so it does not look like paradise to me. 

The last picture is of my camping pod at Callanish. I'll post about the stone age circles tomorrow.