A tale of tall ships and lochs of water

Hebridean Island Hopping

Not only is this a holiday that embraces life at sea. We also had the added joy of landing on a different island everyday so that each day there was a new land to explore. To my childlike imagination there is something of a great adventure story to this.

Travelling west from Oban we moored a night outside Tobermory. On a still evening we listened to the sound of rushing water hidden in the trees and admired the multi coloured houses of the little port.
At the southern end of the Outer Hebrides chain lies the island of Vatersay. We moored in a bay with sparkling white sand and sea the colour of a sapphire. It looked Caribbean but felt more like the Arctic when I braved the waters for a dip. From here it is only a few hundred metres to the other side of the island and the huge mass of the Atlantic Ocean spreading towards the Americas.

In the dunes there were tents pitched at random. In Scotland the Land Reform Act of 2003 established the ‘right to use land for recreational purposes’ and ‘the right to roam’ if the land is privately owned. It would be great to see something similar enacted in the rest of the UK.

St Kilda
The highlight of this trip was the remote and once inhabited island of St Kilda. Often impossible to get to because of bad weather, we were able to motor across from Vatersay in twelve hours in gentle seas to the main island of Hirta. When we woke up there the next day it was a perfect summer’s day. Although it has become a popular destination for day trips from Skye or Harris, the day we got there we had the place to ourselves.

I wander along The Street, the one line of simple two room cottages that once was the only dwellings for St Kildans. Outside each one is a slate with the names of those families that lived here including the name of the resident that was living here up to the date that the last thirty six islanders were evacuated in 1930.

From here I walked through the walled enclosures behind the houses where they had a few animals and farmed crops. Yet it’s the small dry stone structures dotted all over the island that reveal how the St Kildans were able to survive so long here. The St Kildans survived from harvesting hundreds of fulmars, the seabirds who nest on the cliffs. They would eat these and store them in these little houses where the sea air would preserve the meat.

I climbed to the cliffs of Conachair, at 427 metres, the highest in the UK. I sensed that dizzying sense of height as I crept close to the edge. I can’t help what it’d be like to fall off. And look at the black eyed fulmars, nesting on a tiny little bit of rock. I climb Conachair and feel like I am on the edge of the known world.

We stopped off at the tiny island of Canna in the Inner Hebrides, population 15, with no proper roads, two churches, a café, a post office which is actually a green shed, a farm which is at once local museum, campsite and the local lifeguard. The sense of peace and timelessness here is unlike anywhere else I have been.