The news that Lewis and Harris was named the top island in Europe and placed in the top five islands in the world by a well-known travel website would not have come as a surprise to anyone who has visited the Outer Hebrides.
They form a chain of remarkable islands which stretches like a breakwater at the rim of the wide Atlantic and the extreme edge of Europe.
A sense of the oceanic adds to the pleasures and challenges for visitors to these islands, known in Gaelic as Na h-Eileanan an Iar, and sometimes referred to as the Western Isles.
Tang of sea salt and seaweed; crunch of shell sand; more shades of blue and green in the shallows than you can name; shapes of hills and headlands against the vastness of sea and sky: those are some of the sensations, sights and backdrops to enjoy while savouring the wildlife of the Outer Hebrides.
Moors, mountains, bogs, beaches, lochs and rocky coasts are all part of the outer isles scene, and water, both fresh and salt, plays a near-constant part. There are more than 6,000 lochs there, and a coastline of some 1,800km.
So there’s plenty of scope to visit new waters (perhaps when white water lilies are in bloom and swans have cygnets swimming) or explore a new stretch of shore.
Otters thrive in the fish-rich realms of loch, burn and coastal shallows inshore. At sea, the range of dolphins, whales and seabirds can be astonishing.
Marine magnificence
Take a ferry across the Minch or Sea of the Hebrides to reach the isles in summer and you’d be well-advised to linger on deck. White-beaked, white-sided and Risso’s dolphins, harbour porpoises, minke whales and orcas are some of the marine megafauna that might surface nearby.
Come late summer, watch for guillemots and razorbills swimming with chicks, Manx shearwaters gliding over the waves and puffins and gannets en route to huge seabird colonies off the main islands.
Some people relish the idea of journeying the whole length of the island chain (often by bike), from the Butt of Lewis in the north to Barra in the south. As a taster, whatever your wider travel plans might be, here are some highlights from the Butt to Barra.
The wild Lewis blanket
Beginning at the tip of Lewis, in the croftlands of Ness, you could look farther north out to sea to watch gannets heading for the famous colony on distant Sula Sgeir. Just inland, Loch Stiapabhat is the best place on Lewis for watching breeding wildfowl in summer and whooper swans in winter.
Head south and tarry in Stornoway, largest town in the isles, to visit the Stornoway Castle woods. Broadleaved woods are rare in the Outer Hebrides, so this is a chance to see some songbirds. Walk the banks of the River Creed to see grey herons and gulls and to watch for grey seals in the inner harbour.
Not far away, much of the interior of Lewis holds one of the finest expanses of blanket bog in the world. Golden plover and dunlin breed out on the bogs here, where eagles hunt, divers breed and red deer graze. Achmore is a good stopping point to get a roadside notion of the wider bogland without getting your feet wet.
Let’s hear it for the Sound
On the map, Lewis and Harris is one island. On the ground, you can see Harris coming many miles off.
It’s rocky, mountainous and utterly different to its low-lying neighbour.
The Harris uplands might steal the show at a distance, but close up it’s the beaches and small sea lochs that can be the stars. That includes the area of saltmarsh at Northton, which is great for orchids and cranesbills in summer.
Close to Northton, the Sound of Harris is one of the loveliest waters in Britain. Shallow, studded with islands and busy with seabirds, such as the black guillemots that loaf on channel buoys, you can get an impression of it from the inter-islands ferry. Better still, stay on the island of Berneray.
There, just inland from a huge beach along the island’s western shore, is some of the flower-rich grassland for which the Hebrides are famed.
Called “machair”, the plants there grow in windblown shell sand – delicate-sounding stuff, but the colours of the show could blow your socks off. Yellow of buttercups, blues of cranesbills, white of wild carrots and daisies, purples and reds of orchids: these are typical machair tones. There is machair along much of the Atlantic edge of the isles, but some of the world’s finest is from the Sound of Harris to Barra.
Lochans and corncrakes
Keep heading south and, in North Uist, stop at Balranald National Nature Reserve (NNR) to listen for corncrakes at one of their European strongholds. Move on through this country of countless lochans to ogle the breeding mute swans, greylag geese and many different plants at Loch Druidibeg NNR.
Leaving the Uists, call in at Eriskay to meet some of the characterful Eriskay ponies and search for the “Prince’s Flower” by the shore.
This pink-and-white bindweed is named for Bonnie Prince Charlie. His landing there in 1745 may have been a mistake, but makes the island the very first place he stepped ashore in Scotland.
Onward to Barra, superb for its show of wild primroses in spring and excellent at any time for its range of sandy and rocky shores (plenty of scope for beachcombing and rockpooling).
Those include the Cockle Strand, where you could land on a scheduled flight. Take a tour boat for a daytrip to go to near the end of the island chain at Mingulay. It’s uninhabited by people now, but its huge cliffs are thronged with seabirds in summer, including large colonies of razorbills, guillemots and puffins.
The superstar in the west
Beyond this taster of the islands in the main chain, an as-yet-unmentioned superstar sits far to the west of the other isles: St Kilda – the archipelago high on the global wish list of any island-going traveller worth their sea salt.
Europe’s seabird supercolony (none better in the world for breeding gannets, with puffins by the hundreds of thousands and many other species besides), St Kilda has World Heritage status for both natural and cultural history.
In some ways, it’s another story. But, like all the Outer Hebrides, it’s a lure to tempt you out, out to these dream isles of the farthest west.
Contact: www.visitouter hebrides.co.uk. Travel to the Outer Hebrides with Flybe (www.flybe.com) or by ferry with Caledonian MacBrayne (www.calmac.com)