Uig, Lewis Outer Hebrides

A trip to the Western Isles always begins with a ferry crossing and this somehow becomes a kind of mental readjustment, leaving one environment to arrive in another; no matter how many times I do this the magic is never diluted and the change always occurs.

The weather was vile for 2 days, the country barren and severe, it takes me some time to see the beauty, it’s as if its lack of compromise first masks and then accentuates its nature. 2 days of struggling along cliff tops leaning into the gale, trudging through peat bogs in horizontal rain, shivering in steep sided glens when even in June the wind cuts through the winter coats…..and then the sun comes out, its as if you’ve earnt it, paid your dues, and you smell the flowers in the Machair, see the light across the sand, its sparkle as the sea swells up the cliffs in the aftermath of the storm and it flits across the dark Lochans and spateing moorland streams.

Mangurstad, Gallan Head and Uig Bay lie on the western side of Lewis, nothing between you and Greenland. The fronts roll in across the north Atlantic and the air; the light and the temperature are ever changing, by the minute, by the hour, four seasons in one day. We climbed the hills and looked across the water filled marches of Harris, climbed the rocks and gulleys that separate peat bogs and sand dunes from their rugged hinterland and circumnavigated lochs full of sky and birdsong. We saw eagles and jumping salmon, lapwings and falcons, waders too numerous to name; yellow asphodels, orchids and sun dew, luminous beetles, dark spiders and dragon flies. In this part of the world it seems that it is man who is clinging on, other species adapted to their environment are able to withstand the vagaries of a tempestuous climate, it is we who must adapt to survive… 

May 2002