GIGHA
Viking marauders named Gigha Gudey (good island), a reference, I have
always assumed, to the quality of plunder available on this small but
fertile lump of sand, gorse and heather. The southernmost of the Inner
Hebrides, Gigha is still, for my money, the most beautiful and accessible of
the islands, ideal for a one-day raiding party, and the source of unexpected
treasures.
Gigha (pronounced “gear”) is a three-hour drive from Glasgow and a 20-minute
ferry ride from Tayinloan on the Kintyre peninsula (watch out for the
porpoises that sometimes accompany the boat in summer). The ferry carries
cars, but since the island is only seven miles long and one and a half wide,
it is easily explored on foot; bicycles can be hired from the post office,
which is also the island shop, tourist office, B&B and social hub. The
shop is itself a sort of miracle, since it is only about 10ft square, but
sells everything one’s heart could desire, including sun cream, Gigha
cheese, fudge and Irn Bru.
To the west, Gigha looks out towards Islay and the mountains of Jura, and to
the south lies the Mull of Kintyre (oh, mist rolling in from the sea,
etc); on a clear day you can see Ireland. The island has several white sandy
beaches, my favourite being on the northern part of the island, beyond
Tarbert farm, where a path leads down to a double bay divided by a sand
dune, which makes a good wind break.
Once you have bicycled or walked back from the beach, the restaurant in The
Gigha Hotel offers a marvellous carbohydrate slammer of scampi and chips, as
well as children’s meals; for the more refined palate there is excellent
seafood.
I first visited Gigha four decades ago at the age of ten months, and
demonstrated my taste for the island by sitting on the beach and eating a
large quantity of sand; I have returned at least once a year ever since, but
tend to stick to the scampi these days.
The jewel of Gigha is Achamore Gardens, which surround the island’s big house
and are open year-round. A combination of judicious 19th-century
tree-planting and the warm North Atlantic Drift has created a unique
microclimate, where albino peacocks wander among the palm trees.
The lairds have come and gone on Gigha, some benign, others neglectful, but in
March 2002, the island was purchased by the inhabitants, with aid from the
National Lottery and the Scottish Land Fund. Therefore, quite apart from its
scenic attractions, Gigha is a remarkable experiment in reverse-feudalism.
One final, crucial recommendation: perhaps it is something to do with the
micro-climate, or the sea breeze, but on Gigha there seem to be far fewer
midges than anywhere else on the west coast.
Ben MacIntyre
Where to stay: The Gigha Hotel (01583 505254,
www.www.isle-of-gigha.co.uk/hotel.shtml) has 13 rooms from £39.50pp, B&B.
Achamore Gardens (505254, www.isle-of-gigha.co.uk/gardentour/index.shtml) is
open daily, admission £2 for adults.
COLONSAY
All the best fantasy islands come equipped with a bit of everything. Colonsay
does it for real, packing into its modest 17 square miles a miniature
mountain range, complete with eagles and rugged heathland; dazzling white
beaches; beech woods and meadows.
The mansion and artfully contrived gardens of the Strathcona and Mount Royal
family, Colonsay’s landlords for the past century, preside in 18th-century
elegance over their mini-kingdom. It’s that sense of “infinite riches in a
little room” that puts Colonsay effortlessly at the top of my family’s fave
list.
In 1990, when we first arrived, self-catering accommodation was restricted to
Colonsay Estate cottages and a few flats in the big house. The odd sheep in
the kitchen seemed a small price to pay for our view of Kiloran Bay. In the
past decade the estate houses have been greatly improved, and more holiday
accommodation built. But Colonsay’s air of exclusivity remains, resulting in
ferocious possessiveness on the part of those lucky enough to find a holiday
billet.
Of course it rains; when doesn’t it in the Hebrides? On the days you remember
for ever, that’s when: days such as the one we spent idling among the
rockpools of Kiloran Bay, spotting an otter before crossing steep Leac
Bhuidhe, and disturbing three of the feral goats supposed to be descendants
of four-footed Armada survivors.
One low tide, we sloshed across the wet sand which joins Colonsay to its tiny
satellite, Oronsay, where the ruins of a 14th-century Augustine priory
drowse in the sunshine. Corncrake, chough and many other bird species
flourish here as a result of a farming partnership between the RSPB and the
island’s American owner.
If your golf ball is taken by a raven, you can drop another without penalty,
according to a notice on the course. And that’s for real too.
Juliet Clough
Where to stay: Colonsay Cottages (01951 200312,
www.colonsay.org.uk/estate.html) cost from £190 a week. The Colonsay Hotel
(200316, www.colonsay.org.uk/hotel.html) has doubles with breakfast from £80.
ISLAY
My first view of Islay was from a small, circling aircraft, on a bright, gusty
spring day some ten years ago. It was the perfect Hebridean scene: a small
town, with a round church, huddled on the edge of an island far enough away
from the west coast of Scotland to feel like a proper island, and an
airstrip skirted by cows and sheep.
An American friend used to sign her letters with a cartoon of a perfect island
that had one palm tree and a person sitting under it. “An island for you,”
she wrote. “Perhaps a pirate will come to the rescue.” I didn’t believe I
would ever discover that place, but Islay came close.
It was just so intriguingly contrary. It had a necklace of lighthouses, but a
tragic history of shipwrecks; it had seven whisky distilleries and obvious
warehousefuls of wooden casks, although smuggling and illicit distilling had
been rife here in earlier years.
It had mile upon mile of sandy beach, but also rocky cliffs and pebble shores;
it wasn’t a tropical paradise, but it did have palm trees. It had a millpond
sea that you could swim in and Atlantic rollers that could suck you down —
and salty air that stayed on your lips for ages.
I met people who were natural raconteurs, who would offer, at the first
opportunity, to show you their “secret place” — be it a solitary cove, a
dry-stone wall, a loch in the hills or a croft kitchen; I watched as tweed
was woven at the Islay Woollen mill: a tiny operation caught in the cobwebs
of history and yet exporting bolts of immaculate cloth to Hollywood and the
world.
I was hooked, and I’ve built up a mental catalogue of Islay moments since that
first sighting of Bowmore. Riding along Machir Beach on a summer’s day is
one of these, as is hitting a four-iron into the sunset — the ball lost
forever in the dunes behind the Big Strand.
I recall racing barrels during the Islay Festival, when the local populace of
4,000 swells alarmingly with whisky enthusiasts. Mary McKechnie’s cloutie
dumpling at Ardbeg’s Old Kiln Café, followed by a three-hour hike up to Loch
Uigeadail to see the water source for the smoky whisky remains a strong
image, as does the sight of barnacle geese in autumn, migrating from
Greenland for the winter.
The modern world has not passed Islay by. There is an internet café in Port
Ellen and a feisty dinner to be had at the Port Charlotte Hotel. The Machrie
Golf Club continues to attract high-calibre golfers, and no wildlife
enthusiast worth the name has bypassed the bird reserve at Loch Gruinart.
And the view from Beinn Bheigeir, or the spectacular coastal walk to the Oa
peninsula are as they ever were; one day, from one of these vantage points,
I hope to spot that pirate, westering home.
Kate Patrick
Where to stay: Port Charlotte Hotel (01496 850360,
www.portcharlottehotel.co.uk) has rooms from £105 per night, B&B,
the Machrie Hotel (302310, www.machrie.com) from £113. Self-catering lodges
also available. The five-star Kilmeny Farm (840668, www.kilmeny.co.uk), is a
working beef farm with rooms from £96.
To rent: Islay Estates Company (810221) has houses of
different sizes. Octovullin Farmhouse overlooking Loch Skerrols (fishing
available) costs £750 a week, sleeping up to ten.
SKYE
As part of her homework, my eight-year-old daughter had to draw a picture on
the theme “when I was happiest.” She drew a tiny island with a boat, some
seagulls, and a ring of seals. In the caption she described how we had
motored out to that island, grilled sausages on a driftwood fire and sung
songs to the seals. She didn’t mention that it rained.
That piece of homework brought a tear to her father’s eye. The fact that my
offspring show real enthusiasm for the birthplace of my grandfather warms
the cockles of my heart. Moreover it means that my unbroken 45 years of
annual pilgrimages to the Isle of Skye will continue, with no three-line
whips required.
Apart from the obvious physical attributes — the Cuillin mountains, endless
views of gunmetal seas over bladderwracked rocks — the island does not wear
its heart on its sleeve. For me, one of its attractions over the years has
been its steadfastness, like a reliable friend. While the rest of life is
like Hollywood — ever faster, more colourful, with new special effects — the
Skye holiday has always been in slow-moving black and white. But it is
beginning to change, thanks to the Skye bridge.
During my childhood the island was a stronghold of Presbyterianism, and
Sundays were for church-going and staying in; you’d even lock up your
chickens to prevent them doing anything scandalous on the Sabbath. Food was
loosely based on mackerel and scones, with nary a vegetable spotted anywhere
north of Glasgow. And entertainment was something you made yourself — just
you, the hills, the rain and a small boat for Swallows and Amazons-type
adventures. But now there ’s coriander in the Co-op, tour buses that decant
Europeans and metropolitan types up for weekends of gastronomy.
There are even some wet-weather attractions, like Armadale’s Clan Donald
Centre (island heritage), Broadford’s Serpentarium (snakes and reptiles),
and Kyleakin’s Bright Water Visitor Centre (otters and sea life). We,
however, continue to do the same as we always have, and it is hardly
headline-making material.
We always stay in the small township of Heaste, just a string of houses that
straggles down a hill to a shore where a couple of prawn fishermen keep
their boats. This year we bought lobsters, prawns, crabs and scallops on the
shore outside the house. All were still alive, of course, which prompted
much consternation in the kitchen. But that in itself was a lesson in the
food chain, and at least the children knew it was safe to laugh when the
local fisherman said: “Catching fish is easy, the hard bit is catching the
chips”.
The island offers air, sea, light and land in their most unsullied form. The
result is physically refreshing and spiritually uplifting, and the children
never look so well, or have so much freedom. They don’t even notice when it
rains.
Andrew Eames
Where to stay: The Schoolhouse costs £350 a week and sleeps
six : contact Neil Macleod (0033 1 47 34 03 58). Hotel Eilean Iarmain (01471
833332, www.eilean-iarmain.com) has rooms from £125, B&B.
Ferry: A 90-minute foot passenger ferry runs from Wester Ross
to Portree. Adults: £10 (www.overtheseatoskye.com).
HARRIS
Harris is the most beautiful of the Hebrides. While to me Barra seems too
small and Lewis too flat, Harris has it all; the mountains, the
flower-covered sea meadows, the miles of sandy coastline and above all else
the space in which to lose yourself for days walking in the hills creating
John Buchanesque fantasies.
I admit bias. My father’s forebears came from Harris, and I still have family
there. When I go to visit I stay in the beautiful (and beautifully run)
Scarista House Hotel — an 18th-century manse overlooking the Atlantic where
my great-grandmother was born and where my great-great-grandfather was
minister in the 1850s. I have pictures of them both and often wonder what
the fearsome reverend would have said if he had known that his
great-great-grandson would one day come back and stay in the house with his
boyfriend. I have a fair idea, and The Wicker Man comes to mind.
It’s best to approach Harris in a leisurely way. There’s something not quite
right about the speedy approach of an aeroplane. I prefer the changing
landscapes revealed by road and ferry from Kyle through Skye and on by sea
to Tarbert, Harris’s tiny capital.
The island is moody and romantic in the rain and hauntingly beautiful in the
sunshine, when the pale northern light bounces off a thousand tiny lochans
and lights up its white beaches. This is the outer edge of Europe:
nothing lies between Harris and America’s eastern seaboard.
Hearachs don’t go out of their way to attract tourists and haven’t quite woken
up to their needs. Having endured more than my fair share of microwaved eggs
and toenail-trapping nylon sheets, there’s always something reassuring about
the sound of English voices here, with their promise of restored croft
houses, open peat fires and traditional Highland cooking.
The Sabbath is still respected here. If you can, go to a Gaelic language
service while the island’s ancient tongue survives. No instruments are
played but the sound of the congregation singing psalms is haunting, an echo
of the Celts’ non-European past.
John Nicholson
Where to stay: Scarista House, Scarista is the best hotel on
the island (01859 550238, www.scaristahouse.com) and has B&B doubles
from £130. Dinner £35. Ardhasaig (502066) guesthouse has B&B
doubles from £90 a night, and good suppers at about £25pp. In addition to
the above Lena MacLennan delivers excellent home-made meals to self-catering
cottages (550311), £20pp for three courses.
To do: Golf at Scarista (www.harrisgolf.com/scarista.htm)
(except on Sunday) £5 in honesty box. Gaelic folk music every Wednesday in
Tarbeart.
Contact: Bill Lawson (520488). Tickets £3.
TIREE
What is it about certain islands that makes you fall in love with them the
moment you see them? I first came to Tiree on a summer’s day of howling
wind, when the Hebridean sky was shifting from green to black. The
forecasters were cheerily predicting a Force 8 gale — nothing out of the
ordinary for this tiny scrap of green land.
The wind shivered the little plane as we bumped on to the island airstrip, and
ten million marguerites and buttercups shook their heads in a sunlit shower
of silver and gold. I was instantly enslaved.
Tiree is the most westerly island of the Inner Hebrides. It lies low and
double-humped, crouched in the path of all the wind and weather that the
Atlantic Ocean can hurl in its direction. There’s a photograph in one of the
island museums of two weathermen leaning on the wind, their bodies slanted
at angles inconsistent with the laws of gravity. Wild weather is as integral
to Tiree as the flowery grasslands, the pristine white sands and the warm
kindnesses of the islanders.
I did not really know what I was looking for on Tiree, but what I found on
Tiree were beaches where the only tracks were those of sea otters, vast
swards of machair or shell-sand pasture thickly spread with orchids and
daisies, and the stub of a lookout tower nearly 2,000 years old where I
curled up out of the wind and watched deep green rollers storming in from
the west.
There was a clutch of fine museums, I discovered — one to the heroic builders
of the Skerryvore lighthouse, another in a thatched cottage about island
life in the old days, and a wonderful archive of family stories and
histories. There was fiddle-playing and singing by night; by day I haunted
the shores of Loch Bhasapoll with my binoculars, spying on terns and greylag
geese. But the most wonderful hours were spent walking the western shores,
watching and listening to mighty seas bursting on the sands.
Christopher Somerville
Where to stay: Kirkapol Guesthouse (01879 220729,
www.kirkapoltiree.co.uk) has doubles from £76, B&B.
Tiree treats: An Iodhlann museum and archive (220793,
www.tireearchive.com); the Big Fort, an Iron Age defensive tower; ruins of
St Kenneth’s Church, buried in the dunes; birdwatching on Loch Bhasapoll and
bashing the Ringing Stone, an Ice Age boulder, which produces a clang when
struck.
NEED TO KNOW
Getting to Scotland: EasyJet (0871 7500100, www.easyjet.com)
has flights to Glasgow from four UK airports, and Edinburgh from five.
Prices start from £36 return. Loganair (0870 8509850, www.loganair.co.uk),
flies to Islay and Tiree from Glasgow from £69. Caledonian MacBrayne (0870
5650000, www.calmac.co.uk) runs ferries from Kennacraig and Oban to Islay
and Colonsay from £18.50pp (£90 for a car), and from Oban to Tiree for
£20.40 (£122). Mallaig to Skye costs from £5.25 (£29), and to Harris from
£15.65 (£75). Further information: Hebrides Tourist Office (01859 502011,
www.visithebrides.com), Highlands of Scotland Tourist Board
(www.visithighlands.com).
