Wiay, Outer Hebrides

Having to put this archival post out – all due to the Post Office who decided, in their infinite wisdom, to not deliver my films for processing for a whole week! (and to charge an extra £3.17 postage in the process)… That means that it will now be at least another week before my photos come back for scanning so all the posts I’ve written for my recent burst of activity will have to wait awhile. Royal Mail used to be good once – now, like so many of our British institutions, going rapidly downhill 😦

When I was still an Army gal, based on the Uists of the Outer Hebrides (north-west of mainland Scotland), my friends and I used to get about all over the islands, despite a lack of any transport. We’d been down the inventively-routed road down to Petersport many a time and I’d always looked wistfully across to the mysterious and uninhabited island of Wiay.

Wiay lies just off the south-east corner of Benbecula, the island we lived on and, years ago, was inhabited but hasn’t been since 1942. There were all of 6 inhabitants in 1861 though.

Wiay from Petersport

On a quick research for this post, I was dismayed to see the island was put up for sale in 2013 as a shooting estate with planning permission to rebuild the house – I really think the island should have been left unoccupied and not sold to hooray-henrys to kill things! This will probably also mean that you can no longer visit it and anyway the atmosphere will be completely ruined 😦

Back to our trip though… after quite a few months of enquiries, we finally found that a certain fisherman down the Petersport road fished around the island sometimes. We rang him up and he said he was due to lift lobster creels in the next week or so and could drop us on the island – we arranged a date with him.

My friend Linda, myself and another girl, went round to his house – easily recognised by the colourful creel floats around his gate and we bumped down the rest of the exciting road in their van along with the fishing tackle. The narrow road is quite something – very twisty and, over every hump in the road there is a sudden bend either left or right – many times across a rough, wooden causeway.

At the pier, we all piled into his small open boat, they loaded their gear and we were off for the trip around to the south-east corner of the island where we were dropped off in the sheltered Bagh na Haun. As we disembarked, we thought he’d landed us on the moon, so rocky was our landing place!

He promised to pick us up on the other side of the island in 4 hours – we hoped he wouldn’t forget and leave us there for the night! There is no shelter whatsoever on the island…

We clambered up the rocks and set off anti-clockwise around the south-eastern shoreline. All the beaches were either rocky or stony but very pretty…

We continued to Glac Mhor where the smaller island of Scaraclett lay just offshore. We then headed inland to cut across the island as I wanted to do ‘the hill’ – Beinn a’ Tuath (North Hill) – all of 337 feet.

Cutting inland, we came upon a large loch filled with little islands – for some reason this loch gave me the creeps! It just looked dark and mysterious to me. The loch was Loch na Beiste which, when I got it translated later, means ‘the loch of the beast’.

We walked along its shore and then strolled easily up the south-east ridge of the hill, me looking back to the loch all the time to see if we were being followed by something. I have to admit the loch looks quite pretty in the photos and not at all menacing…

It didn’t take long to the summit of the hill where we admired the great views in all directions and then descended the western side – this got very steep and rocky at the bottom!

There we found the old settlement – it spanned several timescales from very ancient to the 1940s ruin. We still had an hour to walk but couldn’t be bothered to do much more so we took a stroll across towards the other hill on the island – Beinn a’ Deas or South Hill. There we found a lovely little loch, Loch a’ Deas, and one of the only trees on the island – a willow growing in a deep hole with only the top showing. With the hurricane-strength winds throughout the winter on the islands, precious few trees can get a hold.

We then made our way to the pick-up point for the boat and gazed hopefully out to sea. Much as we’d enjoyed the island, we were pretty relieved when our boatman hove into view and hadn’t forgotten us after all.

What a shame that, if the island has now been sold to a shooting estate, the peace, tranquility, and in parts, spookiness, will be destroyed by loud gunfire as animals are killed for fun. That’s if you’d even be allowed onto the island now.

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