Australian Gourmet Traveller - (03)March 2019 (1)

(Comicgek) #1

122 GOURMET TRAVELLER


I


t started with the promise of hand-dived
scallops and an honesty box for payment,
and a beach scoured by Atlantic gales. During
a summer holiday I spent drinking peaty
whisky and ferrying between Scotland’s
Hebridean islands, someone mentioned an
untended shack on the far-north island of Lewis and
Harris inwhich plump scallops appeared like magic.
People havetravelled further for less, I’m sure.
A year later, we’re listening to the BBC news in
Gaelic on a hire-car radio, following a ribbon of road
that winds through lumpy peatland, past the Callanish
Stones arranged thousands of years ago in some
still-mysterious pattern, past the Otter Bunkhouse
(for humans or otters, or both?) to a vowel-burdened
place called Uig. We stop high above a beach – pale,
empty and scoured by Atlantic gales – and turn back.
Hidden around a hairpin turn is a pier on a loch, and
beside it is The Scallop Shack, a wee beaten-up shed
clad in strings of scallop shells that shiver and rasp in
the wind. The door is open. Inside is a wooden box
for payments, a ceramic chook full of loose change,
scribbled notes of thanks from today’s customers,
and a bar fridge. Empty.
Och.
So we rummage instead in a sack beside the chook
and shuck a couple of big flat oysters (a quid each,
money in the box, please). Later, at a lodge with views
of moor and loch, Donald Macarthur, our host, pops
in with a lobster he’s just cooked. Over a dram we
talk about whisky, seafood and tweed. Along with
tartan, kilts and the verse of Robbie Burns, these are
Scotland’s great gifts to the world, and their purest
expressions are found out here in the Hebrides, two
mighty chains of islands off the west coast.
For centuries the archipelago was a realm apart,
ruled by Viking kings and ferocious clans, and the
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