Uig Sands, Lewis

It's great to watch the mainland receding from the deck of the Ullapool - Stornoway ferry, although I have to admit that such journeys are much more relaxing when sitting in the bar scooping beer rather than refereeing in the children's soft play area.  We were headed for Uig Sands on the west coast of Lewis, a place that has been calling out to me ever since my last visit in July 2003, having stuck in my  mind as one of the most relaxing and enchanting places I have ever been to.

Uig is approached through the incongrous narrow defile of Gleann Bhalthois. I love landscape features like this narrow, steep-sided glen, that act as passageways between different areas,  in this case linking the  peaty moorland of which much of Lewis is composed to the magical land of Uig. There is just something about the landscape - the brooding grey hills, their profiles aped by the gneiss knolls, dunes and banks of moraine in the foreground;  the beach - really two beaches, the vast sandflats of one remaining substantially unharassed by the turquoise waters other than in spring tides. The bold outcrops of striped pink and grey gneiss that separate the two beaches are doused in sand at each high tide by any Atlantic breakers that make it through the narrow mouth of Camas Uig.

The winds were strong, perhaps gusting up to 70 mph, so I sat in my van, watching the sand snake across the sandflats like spindrift across a mountaintop. The features of snow were there in the sand.In  the wind-scoured areas shells stood aloft like ice nodules, capping tiny pillars of sand. The blown sand accumulated in soft drifts of floury powder. Where the sand had been compacted by footfall it resisted erosion by the wind and reared up, as if fossilised in plaster.

At the both sides of the bay rivers flow down the perimeter, making an island of the sand. Through my slightly rose-tinted shades the water appeared bright purple, like August heather. As my eyes tracked downstream they registered a psychedelic transition through green to bright yellow as my shades augmented the van's tinted windows.

The cost of camping at Ardoil has doubled since my last visit, to two pounds per person per night. By contrast, the ferry fare has shrunk thanks to the Road Equivalent Tarrif. In 2003 I'm pretty sure it cost at least 250 for a car and two adults,now it's only 105, much less than even the 1996 price of 154 pounds quoted in the SMC climbing guide. Let's hope the pilot RET scheme is rolled out to other routes.

Just down the road are the astounding sea-cliffs of Mangurstadh, without doubt one of the most spectacular pieces of coastal scenery I have seen anywhere in the world - remarkably clean. boiled sweet stripey gneiss, pounded by a pulsating, foaming sea. A fantastic treat awaits for lovers of bothies and howffs, for a local man has built a charming small bothy on the clifftop. Through its spray-dampened window the view blurs to become an oil painting hanging on the wall.

The outer isles never fail to inspire me - check out the post I wrote last year when the Sunday ferries started up, or another more recent one discussing Jonathan Meades' comments on the island's built environment.

Lewis and Harris now a viable weekend venue!

I was delighted to learn that last Sunday, the 19th of July 2009, marked the first Sunday sailing between Stornoway and Ullapool.

My friend Kris and I spent a Sunday in Stornoway during a hitching trip round Scotland in 1993. There was little to do and had there been a ferry we would have left the island. In those days the swings were padlocked and there were no pubs that officially opened their doors. Fortunately we had been tipped off by a local that the Crown Hotel unofficially opened its back doors between the hours of 1100 and 1300. As we walked through the deserted streets to the securely bolted front door we felt sure that we had been spun a line, but on turning into the car park at the rear of the premises a faint noise of revelry reached our ears: the chink of glasses; the muffled roar of barroom chat. We entered through a fire exit which lay ajar and passed through the gents’ toilets to the packed main bar. The fun came to an end on schedule at 1300, but the locals left with bulging carrier bags, beer cans straining at the sides, to continue their celidh elsewhere. I realised there and then that Sabbath Observance is not the will of the people; it is a reflection of the fact that in our supposedly secular society an unacceptable amount of power still rests in the hands of the church.

I returned to the Long Isle of Lewis and Harris in the spring of 2007 while cycling the length of the Outer Hebrides northwards from Barra. The sanctity of the Sabbath was being threatened by Sunday ferries and we saw notices advertising a protest that had been planned by the Lord's Day Observance Society. Protesting the proposed Sunday ferry presented the Society with a terrible conundrum. They could hardly form a picket line on the Sabbath. Accordingly their protest would pass unnoticed, consisting as it did of indoor prayer and sermonising. Was this an echo of the past, destined to grow fainter with every funeral, or were the ranks of the Sabbath Observance Society swollen with earnest young suit-wearing men like Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses?

Those island residents who were in favour of Sunday sailings were quick to point out the double standards of the Lord's Day Observers. They reported that the very same people who were so vigorously opposed to Sunday ferry sailings had no qualms about using other forms of public transport on the Sabbath, conveying themselves to church by bus and taxi.

I welcome sunday sailings. Not only does it make Lewis and Harris a viable weekend venue from Inverness, it is a sign that democracy is gaining ground over hypocrisy in the Outer Hebrides.