Scenes on
Lewis and
Harris: Stornoway
harbour. And
opposite,
clockwise from
top left: shucking
scallops at The
Scallop Shack;
Harris Tweed
weaver Margaret
Rowan; wool
producers;
Luskentyre
beach.at the Port Charlotte Hotel, alongside one of the finest
collections of single malts on the island.
From the most southerly of the Inner Hebrides,
we island-hop via Glasgow to the most northerly and
largest of the Outer Hebrides. Despite its double-barrel
name, Lewis and Harris is a single island divided by
a mountain range, with the low moors of Lewis in the
north and the craggy peaks of Harris in the south.
The landscape’s resemblance to tweed is unmistakable,
unfurling like great bolts of cloth woven in hues of
heather and rock, sand and peat, sea loch and stormy
sky. “The land and the sea here are inspirational,”
says weaver Margaret Rowan. “I see something in the
landscape, a colour or shapes, and I work out a way
to weave it into cloth.” She lays a photo of a corncrake
beside a bolt of the bird’s same earthy colours, woven
on her old pedal-powered Hattersley loom, and an
iPad image of sand ripples at low tide sits beside
a weave that cleverly evokes its colours and shapes.
It’s a loom with a view – from her weaving shed we
can see gannets high-diving for fish off Port of Ness,
not far from Butt of Lewis, the northern tip of the
island where the Atlantic converges violently with
the Minch, the strait flanking the mainland.
Rowan is one of about 220 weavers on the island,
continuing a centuries-old tradition of weaving An Clo
Mor – the Big Cloth – known throughout the world
as Harris Tweed. The word was coined in the 1820s,
thought to be a mispronunciation of “tweel”– Scots for
twill. Within a few decades tweed was the height of
fashion in Victorian England, propelled by Queen
Victoria’s purchase of Balmoral Castle in 1848 and the
ensuing fad among British aristos for all things Scottish.
In the Outer Hebrides, meanwhile, Countess Dunmore
of North Harris Estate had introduced to her London
friends the durable woollen cloth produced by her
tenants in their homes, and a unique industry was
born. While Scotland’s textile industry was transformed
during the Industrial Revolution, tweed continued to
be made traditionally in the Outer Hebrides – and still
is. Genuine Harris Tweed, signified by the Harris Tweed
Authority’s Orb embossed on cloth or garments, is
still dyed and spun at the island’s three mills, and
handwoven by islanders in their homes.
From our base at Whitefalls Spa Lodges, close
to the Callanish Stones and the centre of the island,
we drive a northern loop, past the Iron-Age Dun
Carloway broch, one of the best preserved in Scotland,
past a Norse-era mill and a 19th-century blackhouse
village converted to holiday cottages. We end up in
Stornoway, population 8,000, a robust town full of
tweed shops, with a busy arts centre and a gem of a
museum documenting Hebridean culture. One room
features mesmerising time-lapse footage of a year of
weather across the islands; another houses six exquisitely
carved figures from the 93-piece Lewis Chessmen,
a 12th-century cache found buried in a sand dune at
Uig, not far from The Scallop Shack. The museum is➤