Bridging the Gap: Scarp, Great Bernera and Scalpay Grand Tours of the Scottish Islands

Around the Scottish coast, there are dozens of islands -

some great, others small - which are separated from the mainland

by just a short stretch of water, sometimes just yards across.

Early people were drawn to islands because, well, they're just that -

separate, surrounded by water,

an easily defended piece of land that's a world apart.

But today, the very things that once made islands attractive

have become obstacles,

and many islanders find that just how the watery gap is overcome

makes all the difference between staying or leaving.

In this series, I'm on an island-hopping journey,

which takes me to the Northern Isles,

explores the Hebrides and tries to unravel the secrets

of some of the remotest and most mysterious places in Europe.

It's impossible to be precise

about the total number of islands off Scotland's fabulous coast,

but for my island-bagging purposes, I claim it's well over 250,

and that's not counting the myriad of stacks,

rocks and skerries lying just offshore.

For this grand tour, I'm crossing the kyles

to reach some of the smallest islands

that lie close to Harris and Lewis.

My journey takes me around the coast

of the Long Island of Harris and Lewis,

beginning on Scarp, travelling north to Great Bernera

and then south-east to Scalpay.

I'm starting on the rugged north coast of Harris,

where I'm making the short half-mile crossing over the kyle

to my first destination.

The island of Scarp is a place I've always wanted to visit.

It's over there, literally a few hundred yards

from where I'm standing, on the Isle of Harris,

yet it's frustratingly difficult to get to.

There's no regular ferry service, no bridge,

so to cross over, you have to make your own way.

To get to Scarp today, I've hired a RIB.

Making the crossing with me are two Scarp veterans,

Donald John MacInnes and Hugh Dan MacLennan.

My mother is the oldest

living person at the moment who was born on Scarp.

She's heading for her 91st birthday soon.

And we used to come here every summer for our holidays.

It has a hugely strong emotional attachment for me.

I was born and brought up here. I was born here in 1947,

and my family lived here until 1971.

We were the last family -

traditional family - to leave the island.

Despite being so close to Harris,

Scarp never had a proper ferry service.

This was one of the reasons

that people like Donald John's family began to leave,

until the island was abandoned in the 1970s.

Back in the 1950s, Scarp was a wholly Gaelic-speaking community.

There were 19 families living in the village,

which had a population of about 70 souls.

Donald John takes us through the ruins

to the house where he was born.

This is where it all started for you, then, Donald John?

-Is that right?

-Yes, I suppose.

I was born in this house.

Originally, when the house was built in 1882,

this was my grandfather's shop in here.

-It's quite a small shop.

-It was a small shop

but he had lots in it, apparently. Sold boots and...

-Boots?

-Boots and food and fish

and all sorts of things that people needed at that time.

-This was the supermarket of North Harris.

-Really?

-Yeah, yeah.

So, people would come from communities

-on the mainland across here?

-Well, yes.

And he had boats and he would serve these communities, as well,

so he did home deliveries, as well.

-That's amazing.

-This online thing is not a new thing at all.

-It goes way, way back.

-Shop, we drop.

I mean, what's it like for you,

sort of standing here in amongst the stones of the house

where you were born? It must be quite a poignant place to come to.

Poignant? Maybe not poignant.

I like the idea of it going back to nature.

Over the years, a lot of people have said to me,

"Why don't you rebuild it?"

But it would only ever be rebuilt as a holiday house,

and I'm not so sure if I like that idea.

I'd rather it just go back to the way it was.

'Just down from Donald John's old family home

'is a house that holds special memories for Hugh Dan.

'Number 14, Scarp, is now a holiday home,

'but this is where Hugh Dan's uncle and aunt lived

'after they were married in 1952.'

This old home movie captures the happy occasion,

when the bride and groom were ferried and piped across the island

in true Hebridean style.

But things began to go awry

when the newlyweds entered the matrimonial home.

Somehow, they contrived

when they were going to change back into their wedding finery

to go and have the reception down in the schoolhouse,

they went into the bedroom and locked the bedroom door,

and couldn't get out because the key jammed or something like that.

So, the end result was that they had to come out...

-They were trapped.

-Well, they were,

and they had to come out of this window here

in all their wedding finery.

They had to be helped through this window

before they then took off down with the whole mass, the whole island,

down to the huge wedding reception

which was taking place in the schoolhouse.

-You remember that event, too.

-I do. I was five years old,

and my memory of it was the following morning

going to school, walking right past here

at something like half past eight in the morning going to the school,

thinking that we were going to have a school day that day.

And so we went across, we saw the last boats leaving the island

-carrying the wedding guests...

-The stragglers.

The stragglers who had been up all night.

..and the schoolteacher waving them goodbye.

And as we went up to the school, the schoolteacher saw us.

He was horrified and said, "There's no school today.

"Off you go back home. Go home, go home!"

The low stone walls below number 14

are the ruins of the old village street.

This is where the Scarp parliament met,

taking significant decisions that affected the whole community.

My grandfather was one of the senior elders

in the structure they operated at the time.

And he's the central figure in the picture

of the Scarp parliament which we have.

They would decide what they were going to do for the rest of the day,

for the rest of the week.

They would decide that on the basis of what time of year it was,

what needed to be done.

-And very significantly, no women.

-No women.

-A male-only parliament.

Yes, it was, and that's just the way it was,

because the women had different tasks

and they would have been in the shearings,

they were milking and they had other things to do.

It was just the way it was.

So, the men spent their morning making decisions

while the women did all the work.

In recognition of the good old days of patriarchy,

I take a picture of Hugh Dan

occupying his grandfather's seat in parliament.

Scarp might have been remote,

but it was endowed with many of the institutions

that make up civil society -

a parliament, a church and, of course, a school.

-That's where you hang your...

-Cloakroom, yeah.

Big coat pegs for little people.

And then into the single-room school here.

-Primary school.

-This was the classroom?

This was it, this was it. Chimney in the corner there.

In the old days,

-everybody would bring a peat every day for the fire.

-Really?

The teachers here were very encouraging of kids

to go and explore the world.

Basically to educate yourself out of the place, in a way.

That's the paradox of it, I suspect -

that the people who were born and brought up here

were invited to go and do things all over the world,

but not on the island where they were born.

Donald John went on to university

and ended up working for the Scottish Government in Brussels,

promoting economic development.

The irony of coming from an underdeveloped island like Scarp

isn't lost on him.

Do you think the decline was inevitable, then?

It was inexorable, for sure. Whether it was inevitable...

I suspect that they could have built a causeway or a bridge across.

-A bridge would have been a handy thing.

-Oh, yeah, that's right.

A helicopter, even, would have been really good.

An aerial link was, in fact, proposed for Scarp.

Not a helicopter, but a rocket.

The story starts in the 1930s

with the arrival of a young, self-styled entrepreneur

and inventor from Germany, Gerhard Zucker.

He decided he had a solution, or he said he had a solution,

by proposing that rockets be launched from Scarp

to the mainland of Harris

which would carry communications such as letters and so on.

Zucker arrived on Scarp on the 12th of July, 1934.

He'd already pre-sold the idea,

raising cash and producing special postage stamps

to commemorate the occasion.

These adorned letters, including one addressed to King George,

but the demonstration was an embarrassing failure.

Zucker's rocket exploded on the launch pad,

showering Scarp with its payload of letters.

To commemorate Zucker's failed space-age postal venture,

I'm going to try sending my own rocket mail.

Now, I've got a rocket here

and I've written a letter to my dear old ma in Argyll,

and it's simply a matter of attaching the letter to the rocket

with the use of this attaching device known as a rubber band...

..lighting the green touchpaper, in this case, and retiring.

So, fingers crossed.

Into the launcher...

..and...

..and retire.

Go, Zucker!

Wa-hey!

EXPLOSION

Looks like Ma's letter's gone up in smoke.

Zucker's rocket post

was never going to solve Scarp's communication problems,

and as I set off for my next destination,

I wonder how the island might have fared

had the gap to the mainland been bridged.

Travelling through Harris,

I'm heading now to Great Bernera.

Like Scarp, it's separated

from the mainland by a narrow stretch of water,

but unlike Scarp, it has a bridge,

though, famously, there was a fight to get it built.

It was a struggle against bureaucracy

and the intransigence of the authorities.

Without a bridge, the very future of the community was under threat.

After a strenuous campaign, the islanders won the argument,

and when this bridge was finally opened in 1953,

over 4,000 people turned out for the occasion.

Great Bernera is a lovely island.

It's only six miles long,

but the population of around 300 has a noble reputation

for understanding the value of direct action.

In the 19th century, at the height of the Highland Clearances,

a group of young men threw stones at three bailiffs

who'd come here to serve eviction notices on 57 homes.

Now, one of the bailiffs was so incensed at this

that he said to the young men,

"If I had a gun, I'd shoot the lot of you,"

which just inflamed the situation.

A fight broke out, punches were thrown and a jacket torn.

A few days later,

one of the young men involved

was arrested in Stornoway.

When news reached Bernera,

the community reacted angrily,

and marched on the town demanding justice.

It was a bold act of defiance,

which resulted in a famous victory for the crofters,

paving the way to securing crofters' rights.

A few years ago, this cairn was built

to commemorate what's become known as the Great Bernera Riot.

And rather fittingly,

it's made of stones that come from all the crofts on the island.

It's really a very appropriate symbol

of unity and collective action.

Walking to the north end of the island,

I'd come to an extraordinarily beautiful beach.

This is Bosta, one of the jewels of the Hebrides.

There are layers of history in the sand here

that testify to human settlement going back thousands of years.

In 1993, a storm uncovered a rare archaeological gem

that gives a unique insight

into what Hebridean life was like 2,000 years ago.

Hi, Elizabeth.

-Hello, and welcome to Bosta.

-Nice to meet you.

'This is the Bosta Iron Age House,

'where Elizabeth MacLeod plays host to visitors

'curious about the distant past.'

Right, I'm going to mind my head coming in here.

-We're going underground.

-Very dark for a few minutes, as well.

Wow. What an amazing space in here, Elizabeth.

-It's much bigger than I thought it was going to be.

-It is.

It's deceiving from the outside

because when you come in, you're coming underground.

From the outside, you only see the roof.

20 years ago,

archaeologists excavated five Iron Age houses at Bosta.

We're standing in a reconstruction

based on the exact floor plans of what was discovered.

And how many people do you think would have

been living in this house back in the Iron Age?

I can imagine ten, 15 living comfortably in each house,

-if not more.

-And that would be, what, an extended family?

The extended families.

You could easily have three generations in the one house.

-Right, right.

-Quite comfortably.

You'd have the children sleeping on the platforms.

-Just above you, there's a platform.

-Oh, so there is.

And a ladder going up.

-So, when it was bedtime, the children were put upstairs...

-Yes.

..and leave the adults to kind of talk around the fire.

Yes, and they could watch them,

peeping over, listening to the old stories.

Elizabeth spends much of her time here

experimenting with Iron Age domestic life.

She has cooked over the peat fire

and has even learnt ancient pottery skills.

With the Hebridean pottery,

they would get their clay in river banks, streams, lochs.

Then the clay would be taken home and worked at till it got smooth.

And once the clay was smooth,

-they would coil them. No wheel used.

-Right.

So, coiling them, building them up bit by bit

and then leaving them to dry.

They'd be fired by having a pit outside,

light the peat fire, put the pot on top, cover with peat,

leave in the fire for a number of hours,

then taken out, and while the pots were still hot out of the fire,

they'd be put into milk just for about 10, 20 seconds,

lifted out, left to cool,

and it's the fat of the milk that steeps through the pot,

giving them that waterproof coating.

-Really? That's the glaze?

-That's the glaze.

-That's the milk glaze?

-And is it fireproof?

-Yes.

You can put it on the peat fire and you can cook in it?

And I've tried doing that, and it does work.

Oh, amazing. Well, I'm very impressed.

Standing here is like going back in time.

-It is.

-Back to the Iron Age.

Leaving Elizabeth, the peat smoke and the past behind,

I say farewell to Bosta and head south to the island of Harris,

where I take the old postman's path to Reinigeadal.

Until quite recent times,

many scattered communities along the east coast of Harris

were only accessible by boat or rough track.

In 1990, the tiny township of Reinigeadal

became the last place in the whole of Britain

to be connected to the road network.

It's amazing to think that, until 1990,

school kids from Reinigeadal would use this track twice a week

to get to secondary school in Tarbert.

This was literally the school run,

but it must have been horrendous in winter.

Today, this is a road of ghosts.

Walking the track, I'm following in the footsteps

of countless generations of islanders

who came from several now lost communities along the coast.

Places like Molinginish and Garyaloteger

reduced to a sad huddle of stones

and half-remembered names on the map.

After a three-hour hike, I meet up with Kenny MacKay.

Until the new road opened in 1990,

Kenny was the postman who made a 14-mile return trip

three times a week.

-Enjoyed the walk?

-I have indeed. How long were you the postman for?

Well, 30 years. Oh, I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Especially when the weather was good,

-you could enjoy it and always meeting interesting people.

-Mm-hm.

'During his career as a postman,

'Kenny carried the mail a total distance

'in excess of 26,000 miles.

'Come rain or shine, the post had to get through.'

There was no telephone or anything.

It was the postman that took all the local news into the village.

-Mm-hm?

-Yes.

-So, you were like a sort of bush telegraph system.

Exactly, yes. There was no drums, just the postman.

You must have been very well known to the community, then...

-Oh, yes.

-..all round here.

-Yes.

-They'd keep an eye open for you.

As long as you didn't take any bills,

-you were popular enough.

-Right! HE LAUGHS

I can't imagine there would have been many bills.

-Wouldn't have been any electricity bills, would there?

-No, no.

The shop that was down there,

it was mostly bartering with eggs and tweeds and socks and things.

-There was a shop here?

-Yes, there was a shop

-and a store just here.

-Really?

-Yes.

-What on earth did they sell?

-Everything.

-Really?

-Yes. Oh, everything.

Yeah, from a pair of boots to a gallon of paraffin.

'This is a truly wild place

'and people didn't choose to settle this coast.

'They were dumped here by their landlords in the 19th century -

'men, women, children, the old - and told to get on with it.'

There's a lot of these wee villages all round the coast of Harris

because they came here during the Clearances.

They had no choice but trying to make a living off the coast.

It must have been desperate

because there's nowhere to grow crops or anything here.

No, there would be nothing here.

It was just a struggle to survive more than anything else.

With no road, the struggle was hopeless.

Cut off, the communities eventually died.

The same fate may well have befallen the village of Reinigeadal,

where the postman's path meets the new road which opened in 1990.

It was a lifeline and arrived just in time

to secure the future of this little township.

Leaving Kenny, I continue my grand tour

towards my final destination,

the island of Scalpay.

Like Great Bernera,

Scalpay is connected to the Long Island by a bridge,

in this case, a rather fine and impressive one

which spans the narrow kyle.

Before this bridge was built, you needed a boat to get to Scalpay,

and a wee ferry crossed the kyle from a slipway just down there.

The turntable ferry was once a common sight

up and down the Scottish coast,

and provided a picturesque way of getting to island destinations,

but was hardly convenient.

Today, the bridge that replaces the ferry connects a busy little island.

At two miles square, Scalpay is fairly built-up,

with a population of around 300.

Although crofting has always been

an important part of life here on Scalpay,

for many years, much of the island's income

has been derived from the sea.

WOMEN SING IN GAELIC

During the great herring fishing boom

in the early years of the 20th century,

Scalpay was a busy, cosmopolitan place,

with boats, crews and fisher girls coming to an island

where music and song played an important part in daily life,

especially in the production of the cloth

for which the islands are famous - tweed.

WOMEN SING IN GAELIC

Morag MacLeod has kindly gathered together

some of the ladies of Scalpay

to demonstrate the ancient tradition of waulking the tweed,

where songs accompanied the work of treating the cloth.

-What's the song all about, Morag?

-It's a love song.

Well, you could call it a love song. It's a mixture of texts.

And the last verse that Chrissie sings is,

"I'm longing for you to come with your pigidh..."

Now, I'm not sure what... It's...

-Sounds a bit rude.

-No, no.

-WOMEN LAUGH

It's a thing for carrying whisky,

-which would be the drink for them to get betrothed.

-Oh, right.

Is that kind of a betrothal drink

-he's going to bring?

-Yes, yes.

-Right.

'For some reason, I feel compelled to join in,

'and I'm more than happy to prove my rhythmic prowess

'to the ladies of Scalpay.'

And why are we doing this? What's the point of this beating?

-To shrink the tweed.

-Right.

-It's got to go from 32in to 28.

-Really?

So, it needs to be beaten and waulked to tighten up the weave.

-And it's all about keeping up a rhythm.

-Yes.

I suppose that is partly why music lends itself to this activity.

So, Chrissie, are you going to give us a wee song?

A longing song?

THEY SING IN GAELIC

The waulking tradition is an ancient one,

and was firmly part of the female domain.

It gave women the opportunity to catch up, to sing,

tell stories and jokes,

all without the bothersome interference of their menfolk,

a communal activity that produced the fabric

that has become world-famous.

But it's not just tweed that's woven here.

Sheila Roderick is a Harris weaver. Her cloth of choice is linen,

and it's worn by dream weavers of stage and screen.

Now, Sheila, I'm familiar with Harris tweed,

made from wool, woven on Harris. We're on Scalpay.

This has been woven by you, but this is linen.

Yes, made of linen. Yes, Belgian linen.

And it's made on a Hattersley loom,

exactly the same way as Harris tweed,

using the same patterns, the same drafts, everything,

but using linen instead of wool.

Sheila trained as a traditional Harris tweed weaver 20 years ago,

but then began to experiment and extend her repertoire.

I decided I would use my skills on the loom

and I would just look for something different to weave,

and after a bit of discussion, I decided to go for linen.

Knew nothing about linen at all. Literally nothing.

I had to go to the library and take out a book about linen.

I don't think I'd even seen a piece of linen before.

This is the raw material that linen is woven from.

It's flax.

It starts out looking like the end of Harry Potter's broom,

but after being worked to pound down its woody stems,

it ends up as these beautiful, silk-like fibres.

I mean, it's just like hair. It's like a beautiful wig.

This is the original flaxen hair, isn't it?

Flaxen hair, absolutely.

-Flaxen-haired girl would have had hair like this.

-Mm-hm.

I can't believe, you know, the contrast between the two

because it's actually the same material...

-Yes, it is.

-..having gone through a process.

Sheila's talent with textiles has won her orders for her designs

from major film and television studios.

Her credits include Captain Corelli's Mandolin,

Casanova,

The Pirates Of The Caribbean and The Hobbit.

Do you have any samples that you can show me

-that have graced the silver screen?

-Yes, I've got one up here.

This is the grey one that's up here is Gandalf's robe in The Hobbit.

-Really?

-We did a lot of linen for that.

-It's a bit like the Turin Shroud, isn't it?

-Yes.

A hallowed piece of cloth. THEY LAUGH

-Maybe slightly exaggerated.

-Well, it was quite...

I suppose it was the biggest production

that we've actually been in,

and I did a huge amount of material for it, I have to say.

Do you get Hobbit fans coming here

-in search of a piece of the original cloth?

-Never had a Hobbit fan in.

-Well, you might get one or two later on now, I think.

-Maybe, yes.

-Can I touch it?

-Yes, you may touch it!

I'm going to now touch Gandalf's gown.

Wow, so close to stardom here on Scalpay.

Who would have thought?

Leaving Sheila and her beautiful linen,

I buy enough cloth for a jacket and head back outside

to climb Scalpay's not-very-high highest hill,

to get a fresh perspective of this fascinating island.

Wow. The views from this wee hill are truly superb.

Down there, you can just make out the bridge

connecting Scalpay to Harris.

And through the mist is Clisham,

the highest mountain in the Western Isles.

And down there is the famous lighthouse,

the first ever to be built in the Hebrides.

And all around are islands both great and small,

making this unassuming hill

the perfect spot to end my grand tour.

My next grand tour takes me north to Shetland,

where I'll be travelling across the islands from west to east.