Free Seasons on Harris by David Yeadon

content to catch up with “domestics” and e-mails in our cottage. I needed the open road, huge vistas, and spontaneous serendipities—and the best place I could go to find such diversions was Lewis, Harris’s “big sister” isle, land-linked over the North Harris hills. And Stornoway. Focal point of the two islands and a place I’d not seen in over twenty years.
    I think Anne was delighted by the idea of having the cottage all to herself for a day and even promised to “make a surprise” for my return. Of course, like the fine wife she is, she had to remind me how much she’d miss me, et cetera, et cetera, but I could tell by her smile that she was not altogether sorry to wave me off on my mini-odyssey.
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    T HE FIRST PART OF THE THIRTY-MILE or so drive north from Ardhasaig to Stornoway is by far the most dramatic on the conjoined islands. One moment you’re skimming the flanks of West Loch Tarbert and then you’re suddenly up and off and climbing the narrow, twisting road high up into the North Harris mountains. Even on a sunny day Clisham and its coterie of great monoliths seem to crowd in with their shadowyheathered slopes and black broken summits. They’re ominous but also gloriously distracting in their brooding power and their multibillion-year-old permanence. The key here, however—a very critical key if you wish for a healthy longevity—is not to be distracted. The road is little more than a paved cart track at first and barely wide enough for one vehicle, so drivers must constantly be looking out for the irregularly spaced “passing places” designed to permit a semblance of two-way traffic. Most drivers are generally generous and polite, and a combination of accurate distance gauging to determine who will pull over for whom, and lots of we’re-all-in-this-together hand waving, will generally suffice to ensure safe and uneventful passage over the high watersheds. (Apparently, since our departure, this notorious road has been widened a little—but caution is still advised!)
    And then, of course, there are the sheep. Thousands of them—who know nothing of civilized highway codes and gentle manners. Their greatest delights seem to include sprawling themselves leisurely on the road if the pavement is warm, making sudden suicidal chicken-run leaps from one side of the road to the other immediately in front of your car, or, in the case of overprotective ewes, standing in aggressive don’t-you-dare postures in the middle of the road while their young spring lambs amble and frolic to the other side. Even woolly skeletons in the roadside ditches (watch out for these—some are deep to the point of being vertical drop-offs)—gory evidence of unfortunate confrontations between vehicles and sheep—seem not to have registered in their minds. To them, these high moors are their territory and we are the barely tolerated intruders. And in most instances they get their way as drivers shrug and meander around sunbathing flocks, barely bothering to honk their horns. Most have learned from long-past experiences that the creatures are not only dumb, arrogant, and self-destructively defensive—but also apparently rather deaf too.
    As the road widens (a little) and swoops down the long slopes of Tomnaval and Liuthaid, the vista expands to include the sinuous mountain-bound expanse of Loch Seaforth. A small, elegant “castle” appears—Ardvourlie—built as a hunting lodge in 1863 by the Earl of Dunmore, owner of much of this region at the time, in traditional Scottish style. Recently this was for a while an elegant hotel but now apparently has “gone private” again.
    And then, abruptly, the high moors and glens fade and a vast glowering expanse of peat bogs and blackwater lochans stretches out ahead for mile after mile to misty horizons. There are brief interludes of straggly crofter communities at the side of the