You can fly from Glasgow to the Uist archipelago of the Outer Hebrides, but I think you'd be missing much of the experience and pleasure of getting there.
In July, it took more than a day and five separate legs for me to get to the farthest reaches of the British Isles by car and ferry, and each step brought its own sense of the long, wonderful, tough history and culture of the Scottish Highlands.
Every time I traverse this landscape, I am moved by it. As the world seems to become louder, more clamorous and hotter, my need for a landscape that would get Robert Burns reaching for his quill grows greater.
But if solitude is your thing, choose your Hebridean locale with care. I'm told Skye is jam-packed in high summer and that Lewis is busy, too. Stopping in the mainland ferry hub of Oban, with its challenging parking and surfeit of tourist shops and tourists, reminded me of some of the crowded English seaside towns of my youth.
Better to find a far-off island you've never heard of. How I came to be driving a zippy black-and-white Citroen through the twisting, ferry-bound highways of the Highlands is a story that begins almost a year ago. I was having dinner at my friend Jane's in Washington. Her brother James, a forester and ecologist who lives near Edinburgh, was visiting.
"You have to see the machair," he said. "You have to go to Uist." I thought the machair was the title of the Scottish poet laureate but kept my mouth shut. (That would be Makar, by the way.)
The machair, James explained, is a unique biome created by the prevailing westerly winds and storms that race across the North Atlantic and find landfall in the Western Isles. After many thousands of years, the soil has been altered by a mix of windblown sand and particles of seashells. The machair unfolds, first the curving strands, then the dunes behind them, and beyond, the low-lying fields, reaching inland a mile or so. Trees have little hope here — the wind is too persistent — and this strange confluence of forces has given rise to rich grasslands and meadows whose wildflowers bring waves of changing color from late June to mid-August. In this distant, boreal place, the sea had turned into a gardener. How could I not see its handiwork?
'ROAD TO THE ISLES'
To get there, I had to make my way on the last mainland leg from Fort William to the port of Mallaig along the A830, the "Road to the Isles," where the enveloping countryside changes from the broad glens south of Fort William. Here the road cut closer to the hills, which are high but soft with moss.
The first phase of the 3 1/2-hour ferry voyage to the Western Isles saw the vessel threading its way between Skye to the north and Rum to the south, the latter a sparsely populated isle known as a haven for seabirds. The sea, dark and rarely placid, is deceptively vital. From the ferry, I saw pods of striped dolphins, but it is the sea birds that seem to rule the waves.
I detected gannets, various gulls and terns, but sadly no puffins, those garishly beaked beauties of the North Atlantic. I did, though, see many shearwaters, a bird that skims and wheels just above the rolling waves.
The sun was lower but far from setting when the Lord of the Isles eased slowly into the quay in Lochboisdale, the main ferry port on South Uist.
The Uists — South Uist, Benbecula, North Uist and smaller islands, all connected by causeways — stretch about 60 miles from top (Berneray) to bottom (Eriskay). You see visitors in camper vans and hardy souls cycling — not so pleasant when it turns wet and windy. I also broke bread at a campground with a hiker who was following the Hebridean Way (10 islands, two ferries and 156 miles). Even in a car, it takes longer to get about than the map suggests: The roads are narrow, and if there is an oncoming vehicle, you or the other guy has to pull over in a passing place. People drive kindly, as if they know one another.
Forty minutes later, and on the other side of the island, I found my way to the stone and thatch cottage, the traditional abode of the Hebridean crofters, or tenant farmers, and renovated as a holiday cottage by Ronnie and Helena MacPhee. After I arrived, Ronnie came down from the house up the hill to say hello, chat about the cottage renovation and explain where things were. That was the first and last I saw of him.
CLAIMS TO FAME
The Uists are not as well-known as other Hebridean islands, such as Harris and Skye, but they have their own claims to fame. The 1949 Ealing comedy Whisky Galore (aka Tight Little Island), a big film in postwar Britain, was based on Compton Mackenzie's book of a couple of years earlier, which, in turn, was based on the true story of a freighter — the SS Politician — storm-wrecked on Eriskay during World War II. Its cargo included thousands of bottles of whisky destined for America. A good number of them were "salvaged" by the local population.
The other story is how Bonnie Prince Charlie fled after the Battle of Culloden from the British forces (the 1746 battle signaled the defeat of the clan-backed effort to restore a Stuart monarch to the British throne). Despite a large price on his head, the prince was protected by the islanders. On Uist, Flora MacDonald was immortalized as the woman who shepherded the prince to safety by ferrying him to Skye dressed as her maid.
As I sat in the cottage reading about this, it made the adventure more fun, but it wasn't getting me any closer to the machair. Then I chanced on a well-creased brochure that spoke of a weekly nature tour from the field office of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. This is in the midst of the North Uist machair, in the Balranald Nature Reserve. I took a wrong turn, and by the time I arrived at the RSPB visitors center — a tin-roofed brick hut, basically — the building was open but empty.
I set out southward along the nature trail, a track between the dunes and meadows. The white beaches and blue sea beckoned from breaks in the dunes, but they would have to wait. I wanted to immerse myself in the flowery meadows.
In a world where industrialized agriculture has obliterated ecosystems, the machair relies on the crofter's gentle, 1,000-year-old system of agriculture. Crofters, who raise cattle and sheep, have their allotted croft but graze their animals on common land so they can move the livestock between pastures. During wildflower season, the livestock are inland and the grasslands are used to grow Hebridean landraces of barley, oats and rye next to and among the meadows. In fields that lie fallow for two or three years, different wildflower communities thrive.
SEAWEED AS FERTILIZER
The grains are harvested in August after the wildflowers have dropped their seed. In winter, the animals graze on the meadows, preventing more aggressive plants from overtaking the wildflowers. The crofters have also traditionally harvested seaweed to process as an organic fertilizer.
"We have a rare example of habitat enhanced by human intervention," said Stewart Angus, an ecologist with Scottish Natural Heritage and machair expert.
As I rounded the bend in a coastal farm track, I noticed a distant cluster of people — a flock of birders? As I drew closer, I could see a group of about 20 listening to a tall guide with a close-cropped gray beard, a brimless woolen hat and binoculars. That turned out to be Martyn Jamieson, a naturalist and a part-time field officer for the RSPB. He was explaining how certain Hebridean cattle breeds were hardier than the beefier French cattle some crofters prefer and could be left outside all winter. Jamieson is a transplant from Liverpool, as well as a crofter on the island.
The machair is a natural locale for birdwatchers. The nectar-rich plant community is a magnet for insects, including the now uncommon great yellow bumblebee. The insects, in turn, support a rich bird population. Among the special birds we saw over the next hour were Arctic terns, which will dive-bomb your head if you get too close to the nesting areas; and oystercatchers, noisy wading birds with pied plumage and long, bright-orange bills. Skylarks hung high in the air, twittering, and we first heard and then saw the melodious little corn bunting, a bird that has been lost to much of Britain because of modern agricultural practices. These grasslands also support an even more threatened species, a shy, partridge-like bird called the corncrake, which remained silent and unseen.
The tour had opened up the Uists to me in a way that wandering on my own would not, so when I heard Jamieson mention he was leading a three-hour nature walk on the other side of the island the next morning, my response was, "When and where?"
CLOUDIER AND COOLER
The day was cloudier and cooler as we appeared in the parking lot of the Langass Lodge hotel, the starting point of the trek alongside tidal Loch Langass. The loch lies between a ridge and the distant sea on the eastern side of North Uist. It is a terrain markedly different from the machair and more typical of the landscape of western Scotland, a place of acidic peatlands and rock outcroppings supporting colonies of heather, bracken, sedges and mosses. Below us, the loch was ebbing, the time of fish movement and, we hoped, of seeing a hungry otter or two. "I must say," Jamieson began, "the odds are against us. For every 24 hours, they'll be asleep for 18."
I discovered we were ensconced in a circle of great granite stones, which turned out to have been placed on this perch 5,000 years ago by the indigenous Neolithic population.
Jamieson said he had wondered why they chose this location for the stones, and then one evening he glanced northward to the distant mountain. "My jaw dropped. I saw a huge full moon come up, and it appeared to roll up the hill."
One mystery solved, but where was the otter? We walked along to the end of the loch, observing some waterfowl and a colony of basking seals. But we were getting cold, and it was time to head back. In an area marked by islands amid the coursing tide, we saw a creature breaking the water. Another seal, we surmised, but Jamieson was soon on it with his binoculars. "That's an otter," he said, with a hint of excitement in his voice.
The next day, I set out to see the machair of South Uist and was determined not to let the weather interfere. It was raining steadily and windy with it, so the droplets were like pellets against the skin. The track behind the dunes took me to a farm gate, but as soon as I entered the field, a bird rose up from the right and started chattering and threatening to dive. This was another hen harrier, a female, obviously protecting its nearby chicks.
I found a beachside cafe and started chatting to the kindly, silver-haired lady at the register while I waited for my coffee. The cold rain was playing on the picture windows, and I told her I was escaping the heat and humidity of Washington, where, I explained, it was now up into the 90s.
"Och," she said, "it's not right."
For information: isle-of-south-uist.co.uk
Travel on 11/10/2019