Return to the Outer Hebrides!

Day 1 - Getting to the Beginning - Saturday 24th May 2014

So it was that the end of May bought two hardy island heroes back along a well used road, four hundred and eighty miles north on a warm Friday night, from bustling Bristol with its traffic and chaos, via a minor catastrophe regarding several hours spent creating a library of radio documentaries and a lack of car MP3 player to play them on, hastily rustled up replacement tunes from the Fall and Dinosaur Jr, we were back on the island trail, and it was going to be a big one.

Turn the board black to hail the ferryman

And then he will come over to get you

Look closely you can see the sign for the parrot sanctuary

  Just the two of us this time, prior engagements and dwindling annual leave had diverted all but two of the island bagging gang, but the two were the hardcore, and without a crowd to entertain we knew we would have more time to rack up some serious numbers (not to say that company isn't very much enjoyed). Making good time we were as North as Preston before we considered the trip had really begun, through Carlisle over the Erskine Bridge and round Crianlarich before the sun properly came up, and absolutely knackered and uncomfortable as hell by the time Liam parked us up on the front overlooking Kererra, our first Inner Hebride (is that a word, is there such thing a single Hebride? Hebridee?) and a little treat to squeeze in before the afternoon sailing from nearby Oban to Castlebay. After an hour or so's cramped and hardly satisfying kip the ferryman was spied making headway across the narrow sound so we dragged ourselves down to the jetty to make the five minute journey to the first Scottish island of the year. Just one other lady walker joined us, we mused over the mystery of why you would ever want to buy a single and not a return ticket to somewhere with so few onward prospects, but we didn't have time to come up with a satisfactory conclusion. 

Kererra Countryside

This man worked a whole day then drove 480 miles through the night to get here

The Firth of Lorne

Landing on Kererra we realised it must be bigger than we had assumed, they even boasted a parrot sanctuary! We had an hour and forty minutes until the boat back it transpired, so we mustered what little enthusiasm we had after a night without sleep and no proper breakfast, and tramped up the stony track into the island's hilly 'interior' to see what we could see. According to the sign there is a fairly interesting castle towards the south end of Kererra, and a modern marina with it's own attendant 'bar and grill' on the northern peninsula. With no seeming agenda, probably from lack of sleep, we split the difference, and cut straight across the middle, towards neither ancient history nor revitalising breakfast, but a string of quaint and charming little farm-cum-croft-cum-sheds and a near-constant carpet of sheep and lambs that seemed to roam the island without a care for man or slope, so ubiquitous they were. Following their trail we headed to the western side of the island where the views across the Firth of Lorne to Lismore, Mull and Morvern were particularly spectacular. We tarried with the prospect of a couple of possibly tidal islands on the coast, but they were either separated by too much water, or necessitated too much bog clambering to reach, so we contented ourselves with a discussion on what we would be ordering for breakfast in Oban. 

Kererra hills

Unreachable maybe-tidal Island

On the way back to the ferry we encountered a couple of island sheepdogs, excitable at first they soon settled into a game of making us throw the stick, refusing to come quite close enough for us to pick it up to throw it again, running away when we approach then eventually dropping it. This lasted at least half an hour, they never tired nor seemed to mind that they had come a good half-mile away from home. Clearly there are no restraints on an island sheepdog. They were great. 

Kererra Dogs

After ten minutes sunning ourselves in the mid-morning haze the ferryman clearly twigged that he wasn't going to get any more trade hanging around, so he hailed us down to the boat for an early return to the mainland. In Oban there was time to grab a fantastic breakfast brunch in a cafe, stock up on supplies from the Co-Op (mostly Strongbow), check in at the ferry terminal, and most importantly stalk the charity shops for some new in car tunage (Moloko, Gomez, and the Peking Brothers) before Liam grabbed another hour napping in the queue for the Cal Mac whilst I spread out some maps on the roof of the car to fill in some of the gaps for our plans for the next week. 

Sunny Oban

Ferry crossing was uneventful, calm and straightforward, no sea-life of interest, but the sights of the Small Isles and Coll to the sides made us make plans for the long-awaited Inner-Hebrides trip. There's always next year we always say. Arriving at Castlebay and disembarking onto Barra, the first thing was to speak to Donald Mcleod. I had been in correspondence before we came to Scotland, and the plan had already been hatched that the next morning we would be setting out to the Barra Isles with a possibility of a bit of wild camping on perhaps Mingulay or Pabbay. Alas it wasn't to be. With a lack of foresight we'd failed to take into account the fact that the shop wouldn't open until noon on a Sunday, we had no provisions for a night away from civilisation, not even any bottled water, and Donald had a boatload of climbers to whisk away on the tide at ten, there would be no waiting for us to get out things together. A day-trip it would have to be, which wasn't so bad as we already had a hostel booked for the following night. 

Saturday's accommodation was in the warm and welcoming Barra Hostel  where we headed next, meeting a few guys who were also heading out with Donald in the morning, to camp on Pabbay for a week and scale some of the apparently in-demand cliffs. As it transpired, everyone holidaying on Barra that we met had some agenda or others, be it kayaking, cycling or rock-climbing, there didn't seem to be anyone without their own personal challenge. With a car, warm beds every night and no pretensions at anything beyond sedate pedestrian activity it seemed we were the least adventurous of the lot. Still, this was only warm up time for a long week. 

Tidal-Bagging on Barra - Nightstyle

This was our first time on Barra, after coming so close when the ferry docked there three years ago on the way to Lochboisdale, and our the first thing that struck us was the size of it, and how built up it is. Castlebay and environs seem like a real, tidy, functioning place, in contrast the to strung out lonely crofts along the endless Uist highways we remembered from before, after Stornoway it was the closest thing to a metropolis in the outer isles, useful, but perhaps not as romantic. To make the most of the late evening sunlight so far north we headed out from the hostel back down the east coast road to where we had seen some promising looking tidal islands on the way up. A few stops and a few hop-skip-jumps across sandy and seaweedy beaches it wasn't long before we'd racked up a few islands to set the tone for what would end up being a week which already sticks in the mind as being full of pleasant strolls across flat sandy seabeds (or alternatively brisk strides across soon to be inundated landscapes, depending on how sure we were of which way the tide was going). 

Please let him sleep!

Finally at about eleven, forty or so hours without a bed, five hundred plus miles away from home, we decided that we'd need to call it a day, and with one last look at the quiet, peaceful, timeless landscape as it turned in for the night, we did the same, mind set on the plans we had made and the excitement of tomorrow...