Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 34 on 30/08/2007.

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Legendary Lewis

John Hannavy captures the beauty of the Lewis, the northern part of the largest Hebridean Island

Despite have travelled extensively throughout Scotland with my camera for more than 40 years, there are still countless places I want to visit before I check out. One of those, until recently, was Callanish, Scotland’s most famous and stunning group of standing stones. A visit to Lewis and Harris in summer 2006 rectified that.

We drove up to Lewis from Tarbert, Harris, on a dark grey August day – “you should have been here a fortnight ago,” the locals told us, “it was baking hot” – across miles of empty landscape, pausing briefly at Stornoway, the island’s capital, to fill the car up with the most expensive petrol I have ever purchased. Then further north, and west to the blackhouse at Arnol – where the ticket price ranks up there amongst the most expensive admission charges ever for a look round a two-room cottage! We didn’t pay it, restricting ourselves to looking at the exterior and driving on. And what a wise decision that turned out to be for, a few miles west, at Gearannan, a restored blackhouse village offered a wonderful visit for a fraction of the cost – and a nice little teashop as well.

Gearannan’s restoration has been achieved at significant cost – and a hefty grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund – but is worth every penny. What has been achieved here is a superb exterior restoration of a typical blackhouse coastal village – this one was lived in until surprisingly recently – while internally, one cottage has been restored as it might have been in the 1950s, the.....

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By John Hannavy

Section : Scottish Islands

Page number : 18