Member-only story
Time Travel Through Scotland’s Remote Isle of Lewis
“Outlander” has nothing on the Outer Hebrides
It’s a short walk to the end of the world from the cottage that Teresa (my beloved spouse) and I are renting this week. We are staying in the town of Ness, the furthest north-and-west community in Scotland — and all of Europe. The town is perched on the Butt of Lewis (the largest island of the Outer Hebrides), and is surrounded on three sides by ragged cliffs, and endless bog on the fourth.
I hiked along the Butt’s crumbling edge one blustery-sunny-rainy summer’s day. Looking west, but for the curvature of the earth, I could have seen the southern tip of Greenland. Due north: the Faroe Islands. To the east I actually spied the mountains of the Scottish Highlands — odd shaped blue lumps on the horizon. Due south: there’s nothing but sheep, grass, and peat bog, as far as the eye can see.
The island is impossibly remote: a 53-mile ferry ride from the nearest port on the mainland, and the people who live here have endured incredible hardship over the millennia. Endured — that’s too hard a word. When left to their own devices, they have thrived in this cold climate. It’s external forces — politics, war, the avarice of the wealthy — that has brought calamity to their lives.
The town of Ness is — and there is not a polite way to say it — one of the dreariest looking places we have stayed in our Scottish travels. While much of Scotland’s northwest has a bleak grandeur about it, Ness resembles a mid-west farming town: flat fields of pasture for sheep and cattle. It seems there’s no apparent core to the community, just strings of houses along the three main roads. This looks strange to us, but it makes sense: behind each home stretches a long thin strand of pastureland for each homestead’s sheep and cows.
