Outer Hebrides - Arrival
“Oh, he’s adorable!”
I look down the lead in my hand to the small, scruffy brown and white dog at the other end. Sherlock is slowly dripping water, collected in his undercarriage fur from the rain-soaked streets of Ullapool, onto the hotel reception floor. We’ve just been for Sherlock’s last walk of the day before we turn in ready for our early start tomorrow.
“I have a cockapoo just like him back home.”
I return my gaze to the small, white-haired lady standing in front of me. From her accent she is from the US.
“Um, he’s actually a Cavachon.” I reply, knowing that I’m treading a well-worn verbal path. “He’s a cross between a Cavalier King Charles spaniel and a Bichon Frise.” I add.
Not for the first time I am struck by the irony that this handily shortened breed name has to be explained long-windedly every time someone meets Sherlock. Unbowed by my pedantry, Sherlock’s new admirer bends down to pet him. Sherlock looks up at the wizened hand reaching to tousle his curly mop of hair and, as I tense, knowing what is coming, Sherlock deftly moves to the side and ducks his head under the outstretched hand. I have seen this scenario play out hundreds of times before.
“Don’t take it personally.”, I say, apologising for my dog as if it’s my fault. “He’s a bit weird. He does it with everyone.”
At this point the receptionist returns from wherever she has been and immediately bends down to make a fuss of Sherlock and my heart sinks again. However, instead of side-stepping her, he allows her to make a fuss of him and rubs his head enthusiastically against her knee.
“You are honoured.” I say, “He never usually lets anyone fuss him.” trying to spare the feelings of the short, white haired old American lady (who I will now call Blanche to save me some typing). A young girl appears carrying a vacuum cleaner and wearing an apron and she also bends down to Sherlock, who doubles up on his efforts to behave like a normal dog for once as he finds a second knee to rub up against. I can’t help but feel Blanche is now taking it very personally.
I manage to extricate Sherlock, before someone else appears for him to really rub salt into the wound for Blanche, and I slip upstairs. I enter our room and Sherlock trots across the floor to settle on his small blanket under the dressing table. My wife, Mary, is sitting in bed reading.
“How was it?” she asks.
“Terrible.” I reply, before recounting the awkward encounter with Blanche.
“But did he do a poo?”
“Yep, a big one” I say proudly.
Tomorrow’s ferry will take us to the Isle of Lewis and our first big adventure since Mary and I retired, early, I hasten to add, and our wonderful children TC, Lizzie and Rhian flew the nest. We will be travelling north to south through the Outer Hebrides before returning to our home in the north-east of England. We have been married for 36 years and, somehow, we have managed to negotiate our way successfully to this point despite having a fundamentally different outlook on life. I am an enthusiastic optimist. Mary, on the other hand, is a pessimistic pragmatist. At least these are our default starting positions. We work well as a team mostly, since our conflicting personalities generally balance out, eventually, to a happy middle ground. Generally but not always, and this is where things go wrong.
I like being tidy, Mary likes cleanliness. These traits should fit neatly together but, in our case they do not. For example, I like to have a place for my dirty boots to go after walking Sherlock but apparently that should not be the dining room table. Let me share a story to illustrate how this works when we are travelling. A few years ago, on a trip to Hawaii, we had a stop-over in Los Angeles for a few nights to meet an old friend before making that last “hop” to those tiny dots in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I had booked a room at an airport hotel. Once we had waved away the bell boy, since I am perfectly capable of rolling my suitcase to my room unaided, and hauled our cases into the room, I immediately headed for the glass doors on the opposite side of the room.
“Hey, Mary! We’ve got a balcony and the pool looks great.” I turned with a boyish grin on my face expecting, as always, for my enthusiasm to be contagious but Mary was nowhere to be seen.
“The bathroom is a bit small.” Mary moaned, with added reverb through the open en-suite door.
I should at this juncture point out that we are British and “bit” is the understated word in our culture for “very”. With my enthusiasm now somewhat dulled I started to transfer my colour-coded packing cubes from my suitcase to the drawers. After I had finished offloading my clothes, I reached for my wash bag and turned to face the room. Mary, as usual, had pulled the red toggle on her Explodo-Case(TM) and the floor and every other available surface was now covered with t-shirts, jeans, underwear, hair straighteners and so on, even the lampshade had been adorned with a haphazardly placed sock. I picked my way across the few clear patches of carpet to the disappointingly sized bathroom where, it seems, the Explodo-Case(TM) was able to project the contents of Mary’s washbag around a corner and through the door. I cleared a space on the countertop with a sweep of an arm and set down my highly organised washbag on the surface before standing back and wondering how long it would be this time before we found our middle ground on this trip. The specifics may vary but this is always how our adventures start. The only thing that could make a holiday worse would be to put all of us on top of each other in a confined space. So, of course, we bought a campervan.
This is therefore why I found myself at 9am on a gloriously calm late September morning sitting by the dock in Ullapool awaiting the CalMac ferry to take us and or campervan, Little Blue, to the first leg of our journey through the Outer Hebrides. The pale blue sky was clear but it was early enough in the day, and late enough in the year, for the sun, glinting off the placid waters of Loch Broom, to provide only a little warmth to counteract the autumn chill in the air. Two days earlier we had set off from our home in the north-east, stopping briefly in the lovely border town of Moffat and at a camp site on the shores of Loch Ness. The usual clash of psyches had not yet manifested itself but I knew that was because we hadn’t really started our adventure. Although we were far from being campervan virgins, we had always played it safe with our campsites to date, sticking to those owned or certified by the big motorhome and camping organisations. I knew this time we would be both more remote and wilder than on any campervan trip we had taken before. Whilst my machismo told me I could go “full Bear Grylls” if needed (just pass the toilet roll and a trowel) I harboured serious doubts about whether Mary would embrace camping locations that, if they weren’t totally wild, were possibly a little unruly. This had even more significance since, after having our van for five years, this would be the trip to decide if we wanted to stay with the campervan life or make a break for the cosseting world of hotels. We had decided therefore to book a hotel for the nights immediately before we had a ferry to catch to one of the other islands. Mary and I thought it would be a good indication if we were still prepared to embrace the great outdoors (and communal toilets) after each hotel stay or if I would have to physically wrest the fluffy towels and hair dryer from Mary’s arms each time we checked out.
Our ferry takes us to Stornoway, the largest and only town in the Outer Hebrides (every other settlement is technically a village), and leaves us with a short 25-minute drive from east to west coast to find our campsite. First impressions of the landscape, not helped by the dark grey sky of lowering clouds, are of a stark and boggy peat moorland that is at odds with the warmth and friendliness of those we met during our quick stop in Stornoway to stock up on provisions. A visit to the new Museum & Tasglann nan Eilean, built in the grounds of Lews Castle, had shown us, however, that visitors from the mainland in the past were not always as warmly welcomed as we had been.
The brothers Neil and Murdo MacLeod had, for some time, embroiled the Isle of Lewis in a bitter feud when, in 1598, King James VI decided he’d had enough of this lawlessness and so granted a royal charter to the romantically named “gentlemen adventurers of Fife” to tame the island and, no doubt, make a nice contribution to the Crown’s coffers as well as lining the pockets of said gentry. These “gentlemen adventurers” were actually a collection of around 600 lowland gentry, farmers and well-armed mercenaries. Whilst Murdo focused on fiercely repelling the unwanted visitors, Neil, displaying more cunning than his sibling, changed tack and took the opportunity to strike an alliance with them to defeat his brother. Once his brother was out of the way Neil quickly reverted to type and returned to mercilessly harassing the Fife Adventurers at every opportunity. After a number of setbacks and, frankly, finding the island not quite the land of flowing corn and teeming fish promised by King James, the remaining Fife Adventurers decided enough was enough and, in 1610, they sold the title to the Island to Kenneth Mackenzie of Kintail. Mackenzie, who had sat patiently scheming in the wings during this whole episode, took no time in sweeping in to bring Lewis under the control of Clan Mackenzie. This control was to last for the next 234 years.
Despite most of the islanders accepting Mackenzie, presumably fed up of the constant fighting whilst eking out an existence in what can be a harsh and unforgiving environment at the best of times, Neil MacLeod refused to give up. MacLeod and his band of followers retreated to the small island of Berisay, which was heavily fortified, well provisioned and provided an excellent base for piracy and to launch raids on the “long island” of Lewis. The scheming Kenneth Mackenzie once again displayed his ruthless streak by rounding up relatives of MacLeod and his band of followers, putting them in an open boat within sight and sound of the island and lashing it down so the occupants would drown as the tide came in. MacLeod, seeing and hearing the plight of his relatives, felt he had no choice but to surrender. He was captured and subsequently executed in Edinburgh in 1613.
As we approached the west coast, instead of turning left at the T-junction to our campsite, we decide to turn right and head up the coast to the Butt of Lewis, noted as being the most northerly point in the Hebrides, as well as for raising many a schoolboy smirk in the geography classes of Hebridean schools, although I’m not sure the pun works as well in Gaelic. As we pull into the small car park at literally the end of the road the skies lift. Opening the door of Little Blue immediately reveals the presence of a fearsome wind as the door is nearly ripped from my hand. I can see Mary isn’t quite so keen to experience the gale force winds but once I have fully emerged, I can’t suppress the laughter as the ferocious wind rushes past my face. I spend the next few minutes leaning into the wind as I make my way past the red brick lighthouse that looks more like an old-fashioned chimney stack found in the in the more industrial areas of the UK rather than a Scottish lighthouse. Even taking a photograph proves a challenge as the wind gusts and buffets my upraised arms. Mary has already retreated to the haven of the van with Sherlock and I sense she is not embracing the storm force winds like me, currently wandering around like Sherlock with his head out of the car window. After a few more minutes I return to the van, wrestle the door open then closed, jump into the driver’s seat and turn to Mary, who is tapping furiously on her smart phone.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m googling what the maximum wind speed is where you can use a campervan pop up roof,” Mary replies before adding “without dying.”
“Don’t worry, it won’t be as windy at the campsite.” I say optimistically if somewhat dismissively.
I start the engine and we head down the coast road to our campsite and our first night in the Outer Hebrides.
Comments
Post a Comment