Happy Hebrides

We will, I hope, write more about the Outer Hebrides soon, but for now this is just a few tidbits. 

For some reason the Outer Hebrides have been on Juliet's list for a long time; much less so for me. The Outer Hebrides are the most northwestern islands of Scotland, out in the Atlantic past the Isle of Skye. To get to the islands we took a 5-hour ferry trip from Oban, where (among other things) we toured the Oban Scotch distillery. We could also have gone by land and train out to the extreme NW end of the Isle of Skye and taken a much shorter ferry trip from there, but the total travel time would have been just as long. 

We spent a total of over two weeks on the islands of South Uist, Harris, and Lewis. Here's a sample of what we saw and did. 

These are brothers shearing their sheep the old-fashioned way, with big scissors instead of electric shears. Usually they hire a professional for this, but this time they did it themselves. The guy in back lives on the island and works at a salmon smokehouse; these are his sheep. His brother, foreground, lives on the Scottish mainland. This is typical of 'crofting.'  As the excellent small South Uist Museum put it, "a croft is a small plot of land surrounded entirely by regulations": the various crofters have rules and organizations to manage the use of the community land, and the government provides subsidies for various behaviors (like leaving cropland un-harvested until after the nesting season of the increasingly rare corn-crake, a kind of bird) and for sheep and so on.  You can't make a good living on the croft alone, so all crofters have other jobs. 

Heading out for a walk, we ran into some horses that are obviously fed by passersby occasionally. Unfortunately we had no apples to give.

Sorry, fella, still no apples.

One of the highlights of our Hebrides visit was a trip to the island of Mingulay, near the southern end of the island chain. Here, Juliet and a Puffin are sitting on the edge of MacPhee's Hill; the low fencing was put there by researchers who are studying the effect of rabbits on the undergrowth, or something like that. Here's part of what it says on a website about this spot: "One island story relates how, in the time of Mac Neil of Barra’s ownership, a rent collector, Mac Phee, was landed on the island and found everyone dead. He went back to the boat and called to the men, to take him off as there was a ‘plague’ on the island, on hearing this the men rowed away and left him to his fate. Every day he would climb the hill north of the village, and signal to passing ships; they would wave back and pass on. He survived and eventually after a whole year Mac Neil decided it was safe to resettle the island.  He made a special grant of land to Mac Phee in way of compensation.  Since then, the hill has always been known as Mac Phee’s hill." 

The Outer Hebrides were mostly deforested by 2000 B.C. (!), and since then have mostly been covered by heather, grasses, and a few low shrubby plants. There are nearly no rivers. If you build a stone wall there, far enough from the sea that it is safe from even the biggest waves, that wall can last hundreds of years. Eventually, sheep climbing on it and rubbing against it will knock rocks off it, and the freeze-thaw cycle will distort it, and it will gradually turn into a heap of stones. And that heap of stones will stand there for literally thousands of years, unless someone hauls it away. We stopped at a big "chambered cairn", basically a pile of stones with a room inside, that is over 4000 years old!  In the photo above, Phil is crawling outside a "beehive dwelling", a sort of conical stone hut...hard to get in and out of, but surprisingly roomy inside (Juliet can just about stand up in there). Some web searching didn't turn up a date on this, but such dwellings can be anywhere from 100 years old to several thousand years (although, given that one of the three structures here is still intact, I'd doubt any date more than a couple hundred years old). All over the place you see remains of old houses. One ruin was thought to be an old, mostly tumbled-down shelter for animals until a visiting archaeologist recently identified it as a 13th-century monk's dwelling.

Although we could certainly have kept ourselves occupied happily for several more days on the Hebrides, we decided instead to go for a bit of contrast, so we hopped on a flight (or rather a series of flights) to Greece. I signed up for the British Airways Executive Club (it's free), which offers a large selection of honorifics. I decided to go with Viscount, 'cause hey, why not? I mistakenly thought this was sort of a minor thing -- hey, you're only a vice count, not even a full count --- but it turns out "count" is very high up there, so even Viscount is above Baron and Earl.  All in all it's disappointing that I wasn't even allowed to board early or anything.