Isle of Lewis

Day 10: Tuesday

Weather not so good, still better than forecast. Depart for a walk in Harris. Harris is covered in clouds, change the plan to drive to Tarbert, then around Scalpay, then south to Leverburgh. All those towns are not really worth talking about. Weather improved slowly. Going back north towards Tarbert.

North of Tarbert towards the beach of Hargabost, the coastline is mainly composed of rocks forming big pools.

Then we walked around the beach of Hargabost, just south of Seilebost.

Many of the beaches around Lewis are extremely flat, and present those interesting wavelets in the sand.

Just after the beach, on top of the hill, stands the Stone of MacLeod (There is only one!). Weather became beautiful! (Contrast the last three pictures: down on the beach, half way climbing the hill, and on top of the hill).

Back to Tarbert for an amazing sunset.

Same sunset, playing with random filters. (I think that was a red filter and a polar filter together.)

Fish & Chips at the local inn (there is only one!). Drive back home.

Back home we saw strange colours in the sky. We're not sure whether they are light pollution (very unlikely), northern lights (we don't know what they're supposed to look like) or illegal substances in the fish and chips. Anyway, I tried to take them with very long opening times (100s) and here is the result. So it must not have been the fish and chips, as the camera is seeing it as well!

The ground appears red, probably from the public lights far behind the house. The very long opening time lets you see the motion of the stars in the sky. The light in the sky appeared as a lighter blue on the deep night blue of the rest of the sky; somehow this turned green in the photo. [After asking my friend 'Scroc, who knows a lot of photography, these would indeed be northern lights; the colour appeared different on film than in reality because the film is typically sensitive to a larger range of colours than the eye; then when you scan, the scanner tends to adapt the contrast and the colours of the picture, effectively draging colours that you can't see, into the eye spectrum. Some day I'll try a new scan to restore the original colours.]

Day 11: Wednesday

The weather forecast is spot on: rain.

What to do, what to do?

En route to Arnol Black House. Extremely interesting visit of a "Black House" as they were just 60 years ago, guided by a guy who grew up in one of them. The Black Houses are the standard settlement that has been used on Lewis from about 1000BC to 1970.

They are built on massively thick walls of about 1.5m, composed of two layers of stone holding a layer of gravel and sand for insulation. The house is covered by a complex roof: a frame of wood (or anything hard: Lewis bears almost no trees because of the constant wind, so the frame is made with drift wood or even whale bones), holding a layer of turf, finally covered with thatch.

The heart of the house is its hearth: a fire of peat, kept constantly burning. Without this, the house dies within weeks.

The fire produces heat, and smoke. The heat keeps the stones of the house dry, and also dries the thatch while escaping out. Without this heat, the stones will start sweating water, and the thatch will rot. The house dies.

The smoke rises through the roof. In doing so, it deposit tar on the wooden frame, which protects it from rot (very important, considering the rarety of the matter, and how vital it is to hold the roof). Thereafter, it enriches the lower layers of the thatch, which will be later on used as fertiliser during the summer.

Unfortunately, we left without the camera, so no pictures. Too bad, you'll have to go there. (For similar houses, see Gearannan on days 2 and 8).