West is Best Lewis to Harris Grand Tours of the Scottish Islands

BIRDS CHATTER AND SING

People have always been drawn to the magic of the West.

For centuries, men and women have followed the course of the sun,

looking for new lands and a better life.

5,000 years ago,

our ancestors sailed these choppy waters in boats made of animal skin,

with no maps, and just an instinct for what lay ahead.

Now, I'm following them, heading for the biggest offshore islands,

not just in Scotland but the whole of Great Britain.

I'm sailing to the "Long Island" of Harris and Lewis.

In this series, I'm continuing my island grand tour,

visiting the most northerly of the Shetland Islands,

exploring the Western Isles and discovering the secrets

of some of the remotest places in Europe.

To see them through the water like this...

it's amazing!

Scotland boasts a wonderful array of islands.

In fact, there are nearly 300 of them, and that's not counting

the myriad of stacks, rocks and skerries that surround

6,000 convoluted miles of coast, from the Atlantic Ocean

to the North Sea.

For this grand tour, I'm heading to the islands of the far west.

My route crosses the sea of the Hebrides and makes

landfall in the south end of the Long Island of Harris and Lewis.

From there, I'll make my way to the largest town in the islands,

before returning to the coast.

MALE VOICE: This is the little township of Tarbert,

centre of a bare and primitive country,

which is yet a land of song.

I first came to Harris 30 years ago on a cycle tour

with a couple of American chums.

We felt as if we'd arrived in another country.

Leaving the ferry,

we cycled up the main street looking for the nearest bar.

On either side, old men were talking loudly to each other in Gaelic.

My American friends were amazed! They'd never heard such a thing.

And when we did get to the pub,

it was rammed full of drinkers, all speaking Gaelic.

We felt like foreigners, which, of course, we were.

That was the start of my first exotic island adventure.

Back then I sported a pair of handsome tweed breeches,

which sadly have finally run their course and are now

full of holes in all the wrong places.

But now, I'm hoping that this return trip will give me

the opportunity to refresh my rustic attire.

Harris is, of course, synonymous with Harris Tweed,

that incomparable fabric for all seasons.

Made of wool and hand-woven,

it's considered by connoisseurs to be the best in the world.

MALE VOICE: No man is more independent than the crofter,

and the strength of the Harris Tweed industry

lies in the independence of crofters who have cherished ancient skills.

Two hands skilled in the old craft, a spinning wheel and a Harris croft.

Wild irises gathered by the children for the green dye.

These are the things that make the name Harris Tweed.

To see how the ancient weaving tradition is faring

in the 21st century, I've come to the south end of Harris.

This is where Rebecca Hutton lives and works,

spending six hours a day at her loom, which is housed in a shed

at the back of her croft.

Growing up here, where Harris Tweed is just a huge part of the culture

of Harris anyway, erm...

Whether it was just the name that people associate, obviously,

with the island or, like, for me when I was younger,

it was the noise of the loom. I knew weavers growing up.

Like I say, my grandmother used to weave, and her siblings

used to weave, my great-grandmother was an agent for Harris Tweed,

so I've always grown up knowing about Harris Tweed.

And they do say that Harris Tweed is unique.

-It's absolutely the best, isn't it?

-Oh, absolutely.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

All over the place, you know.

I mean, you've seen the scenery around here, so

sometimes it's colours that you see around.

You might see, you know, the sea, or if you go down to the beach,

you see the yellows and the blues and the greens and that.

But it just depends. You see, you get ideas from all over the place.

Sometimes you don't even realise where you got the idea from.

You know, to have an idea of a tweed, you know, a pattern,

a design or whatever, and actually to bring it to life, you know,

and it's mine, it's my creation, I made it,

and then to see it going on from there and being turned into,

whether it's an item of clothing or, you know, a furnishing

or a bag or whatever, it's amazing, you know?

Best thing I ever did was take up weaving.

Well, can you demonstrate what you do to weave this wonderful cloth?

'The quality of Harris Tweed is enshrined in an Act of Parliament.

'To qualify as the genuine article, every step of the process

'has to take place on Harris, from processing the wool

'to hand weaving the cloth.'

You ever tempted to sing in rhythm with the music of the loom?

-CHUCKLING:

-No!

And, er, I did try listening to music while I was weaving

at the start, but I then tried to weave in time to the music.

-Didn't work.

-Not working.

'Rebecca makes the process seem effortless,

'and you'd be forgiven for thinking that anyone could do it.'

Now, Rebecca, I'm desperate to have a go at this. Do you mind?

-Not at all. Come here, sir, come and sit.

-OK.

-Sit there.

-I'm a great cyclist, so pedals are no mystery to me.

Right. And see, there it goes.

That's it. Back again.

That's it.

-Whoa, whoa.

-Oh, dear!

-So, there we go, a wee crash.

-Sorry about that.

Hope you don't do that when you're cycling!

Well, I have actually! A few times!

That's it!

Makes you dizzy, watching that shuttle.

I've got the rhythm! I've got the rhythm!

There you go now, weaving Harris Tweed!

It's gratifying to think that my tentative efforts have contributed

to an authentic roll of Harris Tweed.

Leaving Rebecca, with the rattle of the old loom still ringing

in my ears, I set off along the coast to Rodel,

where the beautiful 16th century church of St Clements

stands guard on a hill.

The church of St Clements has been described

as the finest building in the whole of the Western Isles...

and I'm inclined to agree.

'Its founder was Alasdair Crotach,

'the most ferocious and bloodthirsty of all the mighty MacLeod chiefs.

'He seems to have experienced something of a change

'of heart in later life.

'In the 1490s, he began worrying about his soul and investing

'heavily in the afterlife, paying for the building work

'of St Clements and praying for salvation.'

Now, what's absolutely fascinating is the image that's been

chosen to depict his power and status,

and it's this, a Highland galley, or birlinn, as it's sometimes called.

Now, it looks a wee bit like a Viking ship,

and that's because it is.

Now, like all MacLeod chiefs, Alasdair Crotach was descended

from a long line of Norwegian Vikings, and the Highland galley

depicted here is a development of the ships of his ancestors.

Alasdair Crotach might have hoped that the carved

ship on his tomb would carry his soul to heaven.

But we'll never know if it was sufficiently seaworthy

to withstand the stormy seas of the afterlife.

Further along the coast

are the remains of another chapter of maritime history.

This gaunt ruin was once the centre of the Hebridean whaling industry.

Reviving the age-old Hebridean Viking connection,

a Norwegian fishing company founded a whaling station here in 1904.

A fleet of ships crewed by Norwegians and Harris men

sailed into the North Atlantic,

seeking out the leviathans of the deep, including the blue whale,

the biggest animal to have ever lived on planet Earth.

When the whaling fleet returned here,

the animals were flensed on a slipway, their blubber

refined for oil, and the meat smoked and ground down for export.

Much of the whale meat never even made it

into the human food chain.

Instead, it was further processed and, this sounds almost

incredible to our ears today, it was fed to cows or used as fertiliser.

A truly tragic end for such a magnificent creature.

'To clear my head of thoughts of slaughtered whales,

'I hitch a lift with a man whose passion for music

'and photography have come together on Harris.'

MUSIC ON RADIO: Ever Fallen In Love by The Buzzcocks

# Ever fallen in love with someone Ever fallen in love

# In love with someone... #

'The music on the radio is a clue to the man behind the wheel...

'John Maher from the '70s punk rock band The Buzzcocks.'

I left school at 16 and...

that basically was my first job.

And also probably a large part of my education, in many ways.

I was a drummer, yeah.

I'd been playing drums for five weeks when I joined the band.

So, you weren't exactly an expert drummer when you joined, then?

No, no, but that, that was, er, the punk rock ethic.

After the band split, I thought, "Well, I'll just carry on

-"and I'll maybe get a job drumming with somebody else."

-Right.

And it became apparent that, really,

if you wanted to pursue that as a full-time career, it would

-almost definitely involve having to move down to London.

-Right.

And that wasn't something that I was prepared to do.

Instead of London, John moved to Harris 13 years ago.

Here, he's found a new creative outlet, taking some extraordinary

photographs that capture a different face of the island.

It took me about seven years to get to the stage where I'd figured out

a way of photographing the place in a way that actually interested me.

-Rather than just taking a picture of a landscape...

-Yeah.

..there's a subject in the picture, and it always will be

something that's related to something that people have done.

Like... It might be a house or it might be the old tractor.

It's something that shows that people live or did live here

and did things here, in this landscape. That's the bit that...

-Like these buildings we're passing.

-Yeah, exactly.

-They've got a story to tell, haven't they?

-Yes.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

There are many ruined and deserted homes on Harris.

These are a special source of inspiration for John.

Using long exposure times and frequently shooting at night,

John has created a unique set of haunting images

that reveal the remorseless passage of time.

Well, I'm in focus, I don't know about you.

Er, it takes a little longer with this set-up.

I think this was pretty much the...

one of the first houses that I actually ventured inside.

I thought... I don't know why, but I just thought... I was curious.

And just from a, you know, a photographic point of view,

it's just such a great image.

So it's not something you can artificially create,

it just takes time to make things look like this.

-And it's beautiful as well.

-Yeah, I think so.

But there's something really poignant about being here as well,

because this was somebody's home. You can almost sense the life,

there's all these effects lying around.

There's a kettle on the hob there and there's a little brush

for clearing up old coal dust and there's even a purse over there.

-I know.

-You're kind of reminded of someone's life and yet it's gone,

-but somehow...

-Yeah.

-..still almost, almost touchable.

So often in some of the houses like this that I've been into,

it's like nothing has been taken, by anybody.

It has... It has just been left.

I don't think it's like some kind of bizarre memorial to those people,

"You must leave it as it is."

I think it... I don't know, it just seems to be a common thing.

Not a lot of places in the UK where a house

would be allowed to just gradually, I don't know, go...

I guess it's returning back to nature, really, pretty much.

-Remorseless time marching on.

-It is, yeah. Yeah.

-We all feel it, John.

-Yeah.

Before we're overtaken by time's winged chariot, I leave John,

and Harris, and head north to Lewis.

Although the two islands share the same landmass,

they're separated by a mountain range and some very wild country.

Lewis is by far the bigger of the two.

It's a place of big skies and wide open spaces,

scattered crofting communities and some amazing ancient monuments

that testify to the island's 7,000 years of human occupation.

This is Stornoway, the biggest town anywhere in the Hebrides.

It was once considered to be the best place in the west

for its herring.

This statue of a fisher lass commemorates the young women

who followed the fishing fleets

and the migrating shoals of herring around the coast

from East Anglia to Shetland, gutting the fish

and packing them in barrels of salt.

If herring once made this town famous, today,

it's Stornoway black pudding that's the best in the west.

Just up from the harbour is the home

of this world-beating and remarkable dish.

Charles MacLeod's is a family business.

The shop is known locally as Charlie Barley's,

and Ria MacDonald is the granddaughter of the founder, Charles MacLeod.

-Hi, Ria.

-Hi, Paul.

What a magnificent display of black puddings.

And I've never actually seen a black pudding in its kind of full extent, as they say.

But it's quite an impressive... quite an impressive object.

It looks more like a sausage than a pudding.

Yes, yeah. There is associations with sausage.

The way it's filled, um, and presented is similar to...

to sausage making.

Our own recipe is around about 60 to 70 years old,

and it was all about using every piece of the animal.

So you used the blood and you used the fat and mixed it with some

Scottish ingredients, like oatmeal,

and just a little bit of seasoning for flavour.

So, in a sense, it was a poor man's food.

-Yes, it is, yeah.

-To begin with.

-Yeah.

But now it's celebrated around the world.

Yeah, it's a delicacy now, really, yeah.

Black pudding is about as Hebridean as you can get, but Ria MacDonald's

family have an unusual Latin-American connection.

My grandfather, Murdo MacLeod,

lived and worked out in Patagonia for a number of years.

He was sheep farming over there, a shepherd.

-Were there many Lewis men over there?

-Yeah, quite a number of people from Lewis

went over there with their collie dogs to work as shepherds.

Their expertise as shepherds here transferred quite well over there

and they were good on the large estancias they have over there.

The name of Murdo's employer was Menendez.

He was so impressed with his Scottish shepherd

that when Murdo returned to Lewis to marry,

he was made to promise to give the name Menendez to his first-born son.

And that's how my grandfather,

who established the business here, became Charles Menendez MacLeod.

That's quite unique, I'd have thought, isn't it?

Yes, sure. Yeah, very unusual for Lewis!

-Not many Lewis men with the middle name Menendez!

-Yeah.

Three generations later, the business is still

firmly in family hands, producing authentic Stornoway black pudding.

-Well, I think I'm going to have to buy one.

-Sure.

I'm not sure if I can manage a whole one of those,

cos that is...that is pretty intimidating in size.

-How about one of these smaller ones?

-Sure, one of the little ones?

-Yeah.

With my quality black pudding carefully stowed,

I hit the road again,

feeling confident that friends and family will be impressed

when they see my "marag dubh", as it's known in Gaelic.

But my idle daydreams are interrupted by an unusual

passing vehicle - a bank on wheels.

A once common sight in the Hebrides which,

as earlier visitors discovered, is where mobile banking was pioneered.

And I'd been walking for about half an hour when I saw a van coming.

At first I thought it was from a tweed mill in Stornoway,

collecting the tweed from the crofters' homes.

When I saw what it really was, I just couldn't believe it!

It was a bank - a bank on wheels!

To serve the scattered island communities,

a mobile banking service was established 70 years ago -

a surprising and unique innovation that was surely the first

and the best in the west.

-We ride three days in the week.

-Uh-huh.

So, we go everywhere from the Butt of Lewis

all the way down to Rodel in Harris.

Do you know, when it began in Lewis in 1946,

it was the first travelling bank in Britain, possibly in the world!

Fancy coming across the most advanced development in modern

banking in one of the most remote areas of the British Isles.

How do you make yourself known? Do you have like a call sign?

-Do you have like a...

-We do.

-Is it an ice cream van?

-No! Er...

-A chime you have?

-Our regular customers,

we actually give them a wee sign.

So, they pop it in their window if they're wanting us to stop.

It's a kind of social service,

although of a pleasing, old-fashioned kind,

and a far cry from the world of international banking

so much in the headlines.

This lady, I hadn't seen her for a couple of months.

I haven't been out on this run for a wee while,

so it was lovely to see her and just chat with her

and see that she's doing OK. So, yeah, it was nice.

Wherever the people live, whoever they are,

they get a visit from the bank.

On the face of it, the landscape

of the "Long Island" is wild and barren.

It was this sense of the untamed, and even the primitive,

that fascinated early tourists.

And when visiting photographers and film-makers arrived here,

they were quick to capture this aspect of Lewis life,

showing the Blackhouse

and islanders toiling heroically against the elements.

It was a very romantic view, but it wasn't how islanders saw themselves,

until a local man produced different images of his own.

These intimate and dignified photographs

were taken over a century ago by Norman Morrison.

He went out of his way not to depict his people

as ethnic curiosities, but to reveal their humanity.

For years, these images lay forgotten

until freelance photographer Murdo MacLeod

brought Norman's photographs to public attention.

I've never seen photographs like this

and I imagine he must be one of the very first, if not THE first Gael

to use a camera to record the people he lived amongst.

Er, I think you're absolutely right in that.

I think that he's extremely remarkable.

He was photographing people that he knew well, er,

with whom he had a rapport,

and that is massively reflected in the pictures.

And the pictures are technically fantastic, beautifully composed.

It's a collaboration as well. They're hand in hand,

the photographer and the subjects in these pictures,

in presenting themselves to us as we see them.

There's one here of a young woman sitting beside an elderly woman

who looks as if she's on her sickbed.

Now, not many people would be invited into someone's home

-when they're being nursed back to health.

-Indeed.

Er, I think that, er, there's tremendous dignity

in that picture and I think that it's a statement of the closeness

and the affection between the two women,

but you can also see it in the gaze of the young woman

looking at the photographer.

You can tell immediately,

she doesn't feel that her privacy's being invaded in any way.

This self portrait shows the photographer, Norman Morrison,

who at the time was working as a policeman.

The son of a fisherman,

he left Lewis with hardly any formal education.

Self-taught in almost everything he did,

Norman became a highly respected naturalist,

renowned for his work on snakes.

Although he wrote extensively and was widely published,

his passion for photography was forgotten

until these wonderful images were rediscovered.

I rate his photographs very highly and I don't think you need

any great, um, complex analysis to do that.

I think they speak for themselves.

They are strong, erm, attention-grabbing portraits.

They are beautifully laid out tapestries, showing dress, attire,

er, emotion, interrelationship between the characters in the drama.

All new and a fantastic discovery.

A century ago, Norman Morrison realised the power of photography

to define a people or a place.

Today, just about everyone on the planet

is conscious of the image they project.

Lewis is no exception

and the image that's now closely associated with these islands

has become an icon -

The Lewis Chessmen.

The Lewis Chessmen have an intriguing

and genuinely mysterious history,

and there's nowhere more intimately connected with them than here

on the beautiful sands of Uig Bay.

This is where their story really comes to life.

Malcolm McLean lives overlooking this glorious stretch of coast.

I join him on the sands,

where 93 exquisitely carved chess figures were discovered in 1831

by a local man, Calum Macleod.

It was his cow who found them. It was... His cow was burrowing

into the sand over there and, er, these little figures appeared.

And, er, at first, the story goes, that he wasn't at all sure

what these were, so he ended up

-selling them to a local worthy for £30, which...

-Right.

A fortune in those days, I imagine.

£30 would have been a lot of money in those days,

but it's quite a thought that that works out at less than 50 pence each.

-It is.

-Given that the British Museum describes them

as their sixth most important homeland artefact.

-Well, they're totally iconic now.

-Absolutely.

Do we know how they got here?

Well, there's no hard evidence as to how they got here,

but there is a local legend that predates the finding of the chessmen.

This is a strange story which tells of a local man,

An Ghillie Ruadh, who was working in the mountains

when he saw a ship drop anchor, and a man steal ashore, carrying a bag.

An Ghillie Ruadh followed him through the hills,

thinking the bag contained treasure.

An Ghillie Ruadh ends up killing him with a stone,

murdering with a stone

in order to steal the bag.

Comes down from the mountains, he buries this bag of treasure here...

-Uh-huh.

-..in the beach. And some years later,

he is hung for another murder

and hung in Gallows Hill in Stornoway,

but prior to his hanging, he confesses to this murder

and to the fact that he had buried a bag of treasure here

on the beach at Uig.

Is there any evidence that this is a true story?

Well, there is a degree of evidence

to support this because there is a skeleton in the mountains up there,

that I've seen myself.

And in the glen at the back of where we live,

there is an overhanging rock, which has grey stones placed

underneath the overhang.

And if you pull that out, you know, the skeleton's still visible

in the rocks there underneath the overhang.

Were these the bones of the murder victim? We'll never know.

But whatever the truth,

mystery still surrounds these beautiful ivory figures.

For a long time, they were thought to have a Scandinavian origin,

but a recent study suggests they are closer to Lewis

than previously supposed.

Their intricate decoration is very similar to Celtic artwork,

placing them historically in the world of the medieval Norse Gaels

and men, like Alasdair Crotach from Rodel, who once ruled the Hebrides.

Leaving Malcolm, I wander the beautiful sands at Uig

and reflect on my grand tour of the west.

The Long Island of Harris and Lewis

is a place where tradition and modernity seem to thrive.

A place that embraces the new and where different cultures

have mixed for generations.

It's fitting that the little carved chessmen with their complex origins

have come to symbolise the island.

In standing here, on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world,

I can fully appreciate how west really can mean best.

Join me on my next grand tour of the Scottish islands,

when I'll be exploring the Uists and Benbecula.