“Dear Esther, I have found myself to be as featureless as this ocean, as shallow and unoccupied as this bay, a listless wreck without identification. My rocks are these bones and a careful fence to keep the precipice at bay. Shot through me caves, my forehead a mount, this aerial will transmit into me so. All over exposed, the nervous system, where Donnelly’s boots and yours and mine still trample. I will carry a torch for you; I will leave it at the foot of my headstone. You will need it for the tunnels that carry me under.”
- Dan Pinchbeck
Dear Esther
“‘Come on,’ she said, and led me down a narrow path through the heather to where the remains of an old ruined cottage looked out across the sands, and we picked our way through the stones to its grassy interior. She promptly sat herself down in the grass and patted a place beside her. I sat down, immediately aware of her warmth, the soft sighing of the sea, the vast firmament overhead, the sky black now and crusted with stars. I was breathless now as she turned those eyes on me, and I felt her fingertips on my face like tiny electric shocks.”
- Peter May
The Lewis Man
I wake up a couple of hours later feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck, run over, and then run over in reverse again. Nabbing sunrise and sunset several days in a row (and eating like I normally do on these trips - random shit at random times) have taken their toll. I’m somehow both swollen and dehydrated. I need some skin cream or something. My nail cuticles are profoundly suffering. I’m sleep-deprived and one entire side of my head hurts. I’m also happy as hell, this week already having shaped up to be a (the?) trip-of-a-lifetime in terms of memorable experiences, connection to and affinity with the landscape, and discovery and creation of fantastic images. Such is the photographer’s life. Despite ten years (albeit not continuously or obsessively) of planning and mental hype, the Outer Hebrides somehow have not disappointed.
The prior night’s astrophotography outing means that I show myself a little compassion and scuttle my original plans for sunrise, and make new plans to have a more relaxed morning exploring my immediate locale. I’ll leave the more extensive afternoon open to do a westward power-tour of Great Bernera and the Atlantic side of Lewis, encompassing the expansive sands, dramatic cliffs, and rugged mountains of the Uig district. I wake at the rather humane hour of 7 AM (sunrise looked to be a bust anyway - this I tell myself as I throw open my east-facing curtains to check the cloud cover, which moved in overnight). I head downstairs to enjoy a delicious full Scottish breakfast (bacon, eggs, sausage, scone, black pudding, and grilled tomatoes and mushrooms - together with toast, coffee, juice, and yogurt), my first proper hot meal in days. After relaxing and reading for a bit, I gear up and head out to walk the footpath from Carloway to the hamlet of Tolsta Chaolais (Gaelic, “farm by the strait”) which I quickly drove through as the sun was setting the day prior. The path I trod runs south from the front door of my hotel along Loch an Dùnain, over rolling moorland, and down into the valley where the village is nestled. Called the Scholar’s Path (one of many such-named trails here in the Hebrides), the just-under-a-mile grass path through the moors was built so that the village children could attend school, as legally required of all British subjects beginning in the 19th century. The schoolhouse closed in 1964, and was re-opened as my hotel (Doune Braes) in 1966.
My plan for the morning, to give myself a break from the driver’s seat, is to thoroughly explore Tolsta Chaolais by foot, as I know there are several crofts and scenic views that will be fun to photograph, and being a pied will allow me to take my time, savor the overcast but comfortable weather, and really immerse myself in the countryside. In any case, after several days of it, I’ve gotten sick of diving into lay-bys, throwing the parking break on, and either quickly snapping a roadside shot without stopping the engine, or turning the car off only to be berated by La Pasionaria’s over-tuned and frankly annoying-as-hell safety features the next time I start the engine. The entire trip, I never figure out how to save new default settings, so each time I start the Kia (upwards of twenty times a day), I have to manually turn off its aggressive lane correction, speed warnings (seriously, I shit you not, an audible alarm each second you are driving one mile-per-hour over any speed limit), and an extremely loud and startling “Consider taking a break!” alarm (with coffee icon) that aurally assaults you every fifteen minutes you drive over thirty minutes. I presume this last item is a safety feature, ironic given how effective it is at nearly causing me to swerve off the road and die throughout the week.
Anyways, it is lovely to spend some extended time walking. The grass path, a little boggy beside the loch, quickly evens out into a lovely walk through heatherlands and rolling hills. I stop to photography the vegetation, so unique to this ecosystem - mosses and lichens, and early flower buds on the heather. The path descends onto a residential road at the village’s north end, and I walk all the streets to their dead ends, photographing the local fauna (all the ewes paired with their spring lambs, and a showy rooster with his pair of hens in a front yard). In the distance, I can see the peat fire on Great Bernera still smouldering. I take a picture of a perfectly cozy little house with daffodils blooming in its garden - to show Jane. Further south, the road descends to a crossroads beside Loch a’ Bhaile, a pretty little lake with a tiny pine-covered islet in its middle. Here, beside a bench memorializing a Royal Navyman killed in the HMY Iolaire disaster near Stornoway Harbour in 1919 (and the nearby colorful decorative rocks), I take a panorama of the village beside its lake. There are waterfowl waterfowl (ring-necked ducks and pink-footed geese) floating on the water. I turn now down the road on the loch’s west side, a pretty line of houses. The sheep are grazing in the outfields, and I see a pair of sheep-dogs at work corralling down. Further along, I make friends with a floppy-eared English Spaniel who, bored with his owner’s yardwork, saunters down the road with me and lets me give her belly rubs. I stop at the ruined blackhouse and whitehouse (insert Gaelic and explanation) to photograph them in morning light, before proceeding down to the little white house by Loch Ròg, which was the setting of Katie Morag’s house (a famous children’s book character here in Scotland, turned into a TV program by the BBC). Outside the house, I see a funny scene play out when three lambs approach an old ewe, apparently wanting a drink of convenience amidst their breakfast grazing. The ewe butts away two of them; the interlopers scurry off up the hillside to find their respective, appropriate mothers. No communal suckling - a civilized rule for a civilized society. Next, I explore behind the Morag house, where a grass path continues along the slope above the loch. After poking around the shore and up a hillside overlooking the village, I make the long but breezy walk out of the valley and back to the hotel - a total of just over six miles covered on foot this morning.
After a shower and nap, I head back out in the afternoon. What was formerly going to be my morning’s itinerary is going to be compressed into the hours between mid-afternoon and sunset; I’m going to skip the long hike up the summit of Mealisbhal (Lewis’ highest mountain), which I feel quite at peace with. I make the drive westward from Callanish, first turning off a side road to cross the bridge to Great Bernera. At the island’s northern tip, I visit the beach at Bosta, which affords marvelous views out to sea and to the rocky islets of Floday, Bearasay, and Old Hill. I photograph the cemetery here and take a walk around the hills overlooking the beach to visit a restored Iron Age house, part of an archeological settlement that was unearthed from beneath the shifting sands during a severe storm in 1993.
Back on the road, I drive past another group of standing stones (Callanish VIII) at the northern end of the Bernera road bridge, marveling at the extent and ingenuity of these ancient people in their ritual landscape. The westward highway winds through a region of streams, hills, and lochs, turning into a single track as it curves around the shore of Loch Ròg’s southernmost arm. I follow the road past Miavaig and out to the coast, with the mountain crags of the Uig district looming ever larger to my west. In Uig, I first detour down the dramatic glen that runs to the head of Loch Suianebhal, taking photos of the mountain corrie at the loch’s far end, the nearby fishing bothy, and the braiding flow of the nearby stream as it winds toward the Uig sands and the far-off radar tower, looming dramatically over the region from a peak to the north. I continue out west and south past the dramatic sea cliffs at Mangersta, to the foot of Mealisbhal, where the road finally terminates at Mealasta (“the UK’s longest and most scenic cul-de-sac,” one guidebook joked). Although I don’t have time to hike in this area (there being only two hours now until sunset), on my return route, I stop in pullouts to photograph the beautiful sea cliffs and crashing waves; the distant islands of St. Kilda, which hover like mirages on the western horizon on this fine clear day, and the dramatic forms of Mealisbhal and the mountains to my east, made all the more stark by the dark clouds brooding above them. I am glad to have decided not to even attempt a summit. In exchange for a night of aurora, it seems like more than a fine trade.
Back down the cliffs now, to the expansive shimmering beach known as the Uig Sands. This marvelous place, like Seilebost in Harris from the second day of my trip, boasts a massive tidal inlet. I’ve come near low tide, so the entire expansive is uncovered from the caravan camp at Ardroil all the way across to the settlement of Timsgarry. Deciding not to chance a crossing on foot (indeed, the tide is rising and the ocean will have stranded me before the end of sunset), I step out onto the sands briefly before driving the car around to the Baile na Cille church, on a high hillside overlooking the area. Here, I walk down to the nearby guesthouse and cross a gate onto a footpath that circles the house, to a ruined old cemetery overlooking the beach. Although I thought the Luskentyre cemetery had a view “to die for,” this spot exceeds it,. Between the expansive sands, the tidal braids, and the ring of mountains encircling Uig to the south and west, all tinted by the faintest light of a cloudy sunset, this may just be the most beautiful final resting place anywhere in the world. After taking panoramas and portrait photos of the weathered old tombstones, I reluctantly trudge my way back uphill to my parked car at the church, looking behind me all the while to watch the developing light and swelling tide on the beach below.
My final stop of the evening is just a few minutes away: the radar mast that has been beckoning me from the mountaintop ever since I arrived in this region. I drive through an unlocked gate (shutting it behind me) and proceed steeply up to the tower at the summit. Climbing the concrete steps that lead up to the tower (and around to the back of the installation, where I find the summit cairn), I gaze out at the coast of Lewis. The summit affords perfect, 360-degree views: the rugged, island-clad shores to the north, the loch-studded moors of Bernera and the main island to the east, the mountain walls and shadowy glens to the south, and out to the Atlantic (and St. Kilda, clearly silhouetted now by the falling sun) to the west. It feels like a terrifically wild and windswept and lonely place - a climax of sorts for this adventurous week, and for all the planning and yearning that went into it. After taking a few landscape shots and panoramas (the sunset light, to be honest, is quite subdued thanks to the marine layer of clouds), I take some selfies at the summit, to commemorate my visit. Then it’s a long drive, in fading light, back to the hotel. At the hotel, I find myself locked out of the front door (an honest mistake - they thought all the guests had returned for the evening). After calling the proprietor, I sit in the back seat and have a bite of bread and fruit (surprisingly, the first I’ve eaten since that enormous breakfast) before being let back in through the old schoolhouse’s back door, kitchen, and dining room. Then, eventually, off to sleep.
