128 GOURMET TRAVELLER
tucked inside Lews Castle, a 19th-century gothic-
revival pile surrounded by woodland, recently
transformed into stylish holiday apartments with
views of Stornoway harbour.
The next day we head south, dodging black-faced
sheep that act like traffic wardens wherever we drive,
and over the crags that divide the island. Sunshine
pours through a cloudburst at the top of the range,
picking out patterns of herringbone and houndstooth
in a vast tweedy landscape of lochs, rocks and crofts.
A handsome Harris Tweed jacket is bought at a shop in
Tarbert, across the road from the ferry dock and Tarbert
Stores, an old hardware store that sells everything from
midge repellent and loom parts to shepherd’s crooks
and drench. Across a seabridge from Tarbert is the rocky
islet of Scalpay, where arguably the island’s best seafood
is served by former Glaswegian chef George Lavery. The
North Harbour Bistro and Tearoom is in eyeshot of the
trawler that lands the seafood, its garden-shed aesthetics
belying the kitchen’s attention to the balance of flavours
and texture. Thrillingly, almost every dish on today’s
blackboard menu includes scallops: stuffed in ravioli
with crab, with discs of Stornoway black pudding,
alongside sea trout and seabream, halibut and roast cod.
What lies south of Scalpay, on the South Harris
peninsula, is even more thrilling. A mere map speck
on the east coast called the Golden Road is a single-
lane track of blind summits and 90-degree zigzags that
picks through a Hobbit-like landscape of fjords and
outcrops of Lewisian gneiss, said to be Britain’s oldest
exposed rock. Whitewashed croft cottages and sheep
fanks mark hamlets with strange old Norse and Gaelic
names: Drinishader, Geocrab, Flodabay, Stockinish.
The wind has picked up by the time we step inside
the 15th-century stone church of St Clement’s at Rodel,
on the southern tip of Harris, and is gusting as we drive
along the west coast. Sheep graze and wildflowers
ripple across the machair, the Gaelic word for the wide
grassy dunes that frame the long white-sand beaches
of Scarista and Luskentyre. On the way home, we stop
again at the Callanish Stones, just as a rainbow crowns
over the Neolithic rubble. The existence of fairies and
kelpies seems entirely possible at that moment.
There’s unfinished business, of course. On our last
day I phone ahead, place an order for those hand-dived
Hebridean scallops I’ve come so far to find, and set
off again to Uig. An Atlantic gale hammers in. We
get caught behind a long, slow funeral procession.
Patience is required and tested.
Finally, we reach The Scallop Shack and –
hallelujah – the bar fridge is full of big, plump
shellfish. Like magic.
The scallops meet half a pound of good Scottish
butter that evening. In the company of some black-
faced sheep and a single malt stowed at Islay, we watch
the long blue twilight deepen over loch and moor.●