Uists 2024

In April this year, Flick and I spent a week on the Uists.

We stayed in a fabulous location on the west coast looking out over endless sand and rocky out crops with machair tops. The tide filled the large lagoon twice a day, and the constantly changing light was everything that I had hoped for. We had a good mix of weathers with sunshine and showers, wind followed by calm and one day from the top of Maireabhal we could see St. Kilda, Harris and Skye. On another we drove down to Eriskay, only recently connected to South Uist with a causeway and followed an old track East past abandoned crofts to the coast. Goodness it must have been a hard life, a bit of fishing, tiny areas of arable for tatties, oats and barley, rough grazing for stock and of course “winning” the peats, not a tree in sight. The arable land behind the machair on the west coast was some of the best we’ve seen in Scotland, it seemed strange somehow growing crops of cereals, winter feed and tatties a stone’s throw from the Atlantic with the gale force winds but they’ve obviously been doing it for centuries. In places industrial quantities of Kelp and sea weed had been harvested as fertiliser, it was all wonderfully circular; loads of cattle, sheep and newly born lambs. A magic place with a sense of resilience against the elements that was deeply inspiring.