Before we leave the Isle of Harris, I want to mention a few words about the “big city” of Tarbert, which is located in a very scenic spot. The Gaelic name for the town means isthmus, or portage, since there’s less than half a mile between the sea lochs on either side, one flowing into the Atlantic and the other into the south end of the Minch. The terrain is mountainous, so the land slopes down on both sides to the isthmus.
It’s a nice, lively town, where you can find just about anything. It’s also the location of the Isle of Harris Distillery, which opened in 2015. Since whiskies usually age for 8-10 years before being sold, new distilleries start off by making gin while the whisky ages. In 2023, the very first batches of Harris whisky went on sale, and were sold out in 4 hours!
During the times that we brought travelers to Harris, there was no whisky yet, but we got to experience was the Harris gin, which is a favorite of mine, and won two national awards. It’s not only well made but it also comes in a beautiful grooved glass bottle. Until 2021, these bottles were not refillable, so you could see Harris gin bottles all over Scotland being used as candle holders or decoration. I liked it enough to buy two of their matching glasses, which I am happy to say made it all the way home without any damage. But I am sad to say that eventually they ended their life in our kitchen, broken (we don’t know how) by someone who was an unspeakable monster (I hope it wasn’t me) who clearly didn’t care about Harris gin glasses as much as I did!
As the Isles of Harris and Lewis are actually a single large island separated by geographical features rather than a body of water, we drove north from Harris into Lewis, through beautiful landscape, as the mountains of Harris gave way to the flatter terrain of Lewis.
On the west coast of Lewis, we visited Dun Carloway, a broch built about 2000 years ago. Brochs were round stonehouses built in the north and west of Scotland between 1900 and 2300 years ago. There are 200 identified in Scotland, with another 300 possible broch sites.
The large stones were fit precisely together without mortar to make sloping walls so smooth that attackers couldn’t climb them. Dun Carloway is about 30 feet high just now but it is a ruin, and nobody quite knows how tall it would have been originally.
The double walls were strengthened by staircases allowing people to climb to different levels. It appears there were animals kept in the lowest rooms, and probably the chieftain at the top, but nobody can be sure. The inner courtyard is about 20 feet in diameter.
Just outside the broch, I took the picture below on the left, of the foundation of an old thatched house. You can see the smaller building attached on the right side of the foundation. This is where animals would have been kept, connected to the main building by a door. Some thatched houses were built in a long line rather than in connecting buildings. The long houses had a floor that sloped down toward the lowest area, where animals were kept, making it easier to sweep the floor on a slight downhill, and keep the human rooms a bit cleaner.
The photo on the right is from Gearrannan Blackhouse Village, where there is a community of thatched houses, preserved as both a museum and as a B&B. The last inhabitants of these houses left in the 1970s. The photo in the middle shows a fireplace inside one of the current blackhouses.
These buildings were called blackhouses because of the black soot on the inside. The fire inside, for warmth and cooking, released smoke that lingered in the house as it filtered upward through the thatch. There were no chimneys in the older versions of the blackhouses, and although people could sleep there, with cleaner air at the bottom, taller people would probably have to deal with a bit of smoke inhalation.
There’s a display in the museum at Kildonan on South Uist which cautions people not to overly romanticize the blackhouses. People who lived there did not generally live in good health, and likely spent most of their time outside. The South Uist museum displays photos of the homes of some of the former residents who emigrated to America. Each generation had a larger and more solid house, compared with the poverty of those who remained in the blackhouses. The display reminded visitors that poverty is no fun and cannot be improved through nostalgia.
One of the great highlights of visiting Lewis was to see the standing stones at Callanish. Erected around 5000 years ago, these structures predate the pyramids of Egypt, and were built about 2000 years before Stonehenge.
Several other stone circles have been found in nearby areas, but Callanish is the most famous site. It fell into disuse about 3500 years ago, and by the 1850s, five feet of peat had to be cleared away in order to discover the true height of the stones, and some of the details of their arrangement.
Visible from the site are some rolling hills that were viewed by the ancient residents as a reclining woman, as is clear from the name of the hills. In fact, many sites around Scotland were given women’s names by the indigenous people, later sometimes called the Picts, and it is thought that a native religion focusing on women continued in Scotland all the way until the witch trials in the 1500s began ferreting out women who seemed suspicious to Protestant authorities.
The layout of the Callanish standing stones include a central stone circle marked by a very tall stone and an altar, with a double row of stones extending a long ways in one direction and shorter distances to the sides. Some view this arrangement as prefiguring a Celtic cross.
Below, you can see the layout of the stones, and some of the groupings that I photographed from various angles.
Below at left and right are some photos at the stone circle, where there remains what must have been an altar, with the tallest stone just behind it.
I loved the personalities of the various stones, with all their different shapes weathered by the millenia. Take a look below on the left for a view by the famous photographer Edward Steichen of a sculpture of Balzac made by August Rodin. Compare it to the two standing stones on the right. Don’t they have a similar pose and gravitas? The one in the middle includes a man who was passing by, wearing a hoodie, a perfect complement to the stone.
We’ll finish up with a gallery of “portraits” I took of many of the standing stones. Some of them really need names! If you’re viewing this in an email, you might want to visit this article on Substack so you can zoom in and see some of the photos better.
In the next couple of weeks, we’ll conclude our tour of the Outer Hebrides with a visit to the Hebridean Celtic Festival, which I’ll tell a lot more about next time. We planned our trips to finish with this amazing musical event, followed by an early morning boat ride across the Minch and a long but beautiful drive back to Stirling. See you next week!