LEWIS AND HARRIS
A
lthough I was born and brought up in Glasgow, going back to the Outer Hebri- des feels more to me like going home.
The last time I was on my way there from where I live in France, I had an unscheduled overnight stop in Glasgow. In the morning I got up early and wandered around the city. It was empty and held many poignant memories for me. But I felt like a ghost haunting my own past, and maybe for the first time in my life realised it was no longer my home. During the 1990s, I lived on the Isle of
Lewis five months a year for five years while I produced the Gaelic drama series Machair for Scottish Television. My partner, Janice Hally, and myself had been commissioned to come up with a Gaelic-language soap opera, which is what led to our first visit there in 1990. We arrived at Tarbert in Harris by ferry from Uig on the Isle of Skye and drove north to the Isle of Lewis. We had rented a holiday cottage in Port of
Ness, which is at the northernmost tip of the island, so we had to drive the whole length of it to get there. The first thing that struck us was the complete absence of trees. In the south the countryside was bleak and wild and peppered by myriad small lochs. In the north it was flat with featureless peat bogs stretching off to the horizon. By contrast the coastline was marked by towering cliffs of black gneiss and deserted golden beaches. Villages were strung out along the road like blocks of Lego, completely exposed to the elements because of the lack of any trees or shrubs. Another thing that struck us on arrival was
the wind. It simply never stops. It arrives across 3,000 miles of Atlantic and hits the island with frightening force. And, of course, the weather it brings changes in the blink of an eye. This was something that would dog us through all the later years of filming. Between doing the master shot and the
reverse shots, sun could change to rain, or even sleet, black clouds vanishing in an instant to wash the land with sunlight and punctu-
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Previous page: The writer at Callanish standing stones. Above: Author Peter May in front of Gearrannan Blackhouse village: the first of his hugely successful Lewis Trilogy was called The Blackhouse.
ate it with rainbows – making continuity all but impossible. And while the weather clearly dominates so many physical aspects of life on the island, we very quickly discovered that it was the church that dominated cultural life. When we visited that first time, there were no Sunday ferries or flights. And nothing was open, neither shops, nor restaurants, nor filling stations. Public toilets were locked, and even children’s swings were chained up. If your hotel or guest house did not serve
Sunday lunch then you would simply go hungry. I remember my first Lewis Sunday, wandering
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