Julian Worker's Blog, page 2

Staffa

This is an extract from my new book “Travels through History : 10 Scottish Islands” available here.

The Treshnish Islands and Staffa are a wonderful day trip from Tobermory on Mull. If you like seabirds, especially puffins, then a trip to Lunga, one of the Treshnish Islands, is probably the best place for you to visit. Before you go, look at the map of the area and you’ll see that to go on this trip, you’ll have to go on the open sea for about an hour in each direction. The sea can be choppy. On my trip, there was a northerly breeze, so the outward trip was fairly smooth, but coming back, the sturdy boat moved from side to side regularly, but without going up and down at the same time. I’m not a good sailor, but I suffered no ill effects standing on the top deck with my hands holding onto the handrail. A waterproof might be a good idea, as the occasional wave went over the boat when we changed direction. 

My understanding is that each party that lands on Lunga is accompanied by a warden from the National Trust for Scotland who makes sure that visitors respect the island and all its non-human inhabitants.   

Staffa lies about 10 kilometres (6 mi) west of Mull, and 9 km northeast of Iona. It is oriented north–south, and is a kilometre long by about half a kilometre wide. The Vikings gave it this name supposedly as its columnar basalt reminded them of their houses, which were built from vertically placed tree-logs.  

Staffa is famous for two reasons. The first is Fingal’s Cave, a sea cave known for its natural acoustics. The National Trust for Scotland owns the cave as part of a National Nature Reserve. It became known as Fingal’s Cave after the eponymous hero of an epic poem by 18th-century Scots poet-historian James Macpherson. In Irish mythology, the hero Fingal is known as Fionn mac Cumhaill, and Macpherson rendered the name as Fingal (meaning “white stranger”). The legend of the Giant’s Causeway has Fionn building the causeway between Ireland and Scotland.

Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn visited Staffa in 1829 and wrote an overture, The Hebrides, Op. 26, (also known as the Fingal’s Cave Overture), that was said to be inspired by the weird echoes in the cave. Mendelssohn’s overture popularized the cave as a tourist destination, and soon poets and painters such as William Wordsworth, John Keats, and JMW Turner were visiting. 

Iona

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Mull

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Jura

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Islay

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Vatersay in the Outer Hebrides

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Barra in the Outer Hebrides

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Harris

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Stornoway on Lewis

This is an extract from my new book “Travels through History : 10 Scottish Islands” available here.

Stornoway is the principal town on the island of Lewis and is the gateway to the island and to the whole of the Outer Hebrides. Loganair flies from Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Inverness to Stornoway several times a day from Monday to Friday, twice a day on Saturday and once a day on Sunday. There are also return flights to Benbecula twice a week. The Caledonian MacBrayne (Calmac) ferry terminal is just beyond the bus station. Ferries sail to Ullapool two or three times a week. Buses run from Stornoway all over the island, though there are no bus services on a Sunday. 

There aren’t too many sights in the town itself. The harbour has activity in the early morning with the landing of fish. Lews Castle is visible across the water. This castle is a 19th-Century edifice built by Sir James Matheson, with money earned from tea and from opium. Recently, a massive restoration program converted the castle into luxury self-catering accommodation; however, the grand public rooms on the ground floor remain free to visit when unoccupied. When Donald J Trump visited Stornoway to see the place where his mother lived in her early days (she was a McLeod, I believe), he did not help towards the costs of the restoration. 

Sir James Matheson was behind one of the worst examples of removals from the land in Scottish history. This occurred between 1851 and 1855. He decided to ‘emigrate’ many of his destitute tenants through a programme of eviction and ‘assisted’ transportation to Canada. No fewer than 2,327 men, women, and children faced the bleak choice of either being cleared from the land or emigrating with little chance of return. In 1851, before the evictions, the population of Lewis outside Stornoway was 17,320. The proportion ‘emigrated’ accounted for just over 13% of that total. 

Of the first 1,512 selected, only forty-five took the offer of support for the voyage to Canada. The rest had to be made to go. Another strange fact about Matheson was that he spent over £107,000 on the island of Lewis between 1845 and 1850 on famine relief and public works. Yet, between 1848 and 1851, he obtained 1,367 summonses of removal against his tenants.  

Arnol Blackhouse on Lewis

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