GOURMET TRAVELLER 123islands still look and feel utterly different from the
mainland, or anywhere else. More than half the
islanders of the Outer Hebrides speak Scots Gaelic,
for starters, and the widespread observance of the
Sabbath among the Presbyterian islanders makes
Sundays very quiet indeed. When Scottish lawyer
James Boswell mentioned a tour of the Hebrides to
his friend Voltaire, the French philosopher “looked
at me as if I had talked of going to the North Pole”.
Boswell and his old friend Samuel Johnson, the
celebrity London diarist, both wrote acclaimed
accounts of their rather sodden 83-day tour in 1773.
Mine is brief by comparison and so much more
fun, involving (quite) a few drams on Islay, the home
of Scotland’s unique peaty single malts, and a road trip
on the isle of Lewis and Harris, through mountains
and moors that have inspired generations of Harris
Tweed weavers. And along the way, suppers of halibut
and sea trout, lobster and brown crab, and sweet,
meaty scallops.
Like Johnson and Boswell, I start in Scotland’s
handsome capital. From a sandstone terrace above
the city’s Royal Mile, I can hear bagpipes and seagulls,
and a glorious confusion of architecture lies before
me. “There’s nowhere else like Edinburgh,” says guide
Jane Roy next morning as we enter the Old Town’s
labyrinth of dark closes, their cobbles worn smooth
by centuries of footfall. “An intact medieval city sits
adjacent to an intact Victorian-era city, rather than a
new town encircling the old heart.” We climb another
winding staircase and pop up, rabbit-like, on Victoria
Clockwise from
far left: whisky
at Bruichladdich;
Finlaggan, Islay;
The Scallop
Shack co-owner
and diver Dave
Smith; 21st
Century Kilts
designs; the Royal
Mile, Edinburgh.Street, its curl of fairytale façades inhabited by shops
selling magic wands, antiques and tweed suits.
A bell tinkles above the door at Walker Slater,
tweed specialist to gentlemen, and gentlemen hipsters.
“What’ll it be?” asks Joe Hall, the house’s made-to-
measure tailor, moustachioed and resplendent in
turquoise high-waisted trousers and braces. When I
reach his attic studio at the top of the stairs he points
to a crystal decanter of whisky – as integral to tailoring
here as the taking of measurements. Arrayed around
him are “bunch books” of tweed from across Scotland,
England and Ireland. He points out a swatch fixed
with a rusty bulldog clip from Donald John Mackay
at Luskentyre on Lewis and Harris – “a fantastic
weaver, you’ll never see this diversity of colour, and the
subtlety is beyond anyone else’s” – and another from
Ardalanish on the isle of Mull, a small off-the-grid mill
that uses wool grown on the property, natural dyes
and revives traditional patterns on 1920s looms. For
contrast Hall reaches for a swatch from the high-tech
Lovat Mill in the Scottish border town of Hawick –
“in the islands there’s the clackety-clack of looms,
but at Lovat it’s a low hum, almost futuristic”. Even
more high-tech is a Lovat tweed woven with Teflon- “for truly vicious weather”, says Hall.
Business is booming here at tweed central in
Edinburgh, propelled by the increasingly mainstream
taste for the artisanal rather than the mass-produced,
and growing interest in provenance and sustainable
consumption. “Tweed is made here, in Scotland, by
people who support local communities,” says Hall.➤