- 01 BARRA | Traigh Eais beach looking west over the Atlantic to America
A 2015 tour of Western Scotland by train, bus, ferry and foot included time on Barra which is the southernmost inhabited island in the Outer Hebrides. Traigh Eais is a 1.5 mile beach at the northern end of the island with America as the next landfall to the west. A few hundred yards through the dunes and over the road at its back are the sands of Traigh Mhor, the landing ground for Barra Airport. It’s the only tidal airport in the world served by scheduled air services.
- 02 BARRA | Traigh Eais | A pool on sand with pebbles large and small
To the north the low dunes were replaced by rising grass covered rocks which curved seawards as a cliff at the end of the beach. They backed linear pools three of which I recorded for their contrasting forms, colours and textures. This first one was quite warm in tone, its rounded stones covered by a shallow layer of clear and undisturbed water.
- 03 BARRA | Traigh Eais | A pool at the back of the beach below a cliff
The backing rocks heightened and they and the sand below them changed their warm tones for cool greys with subtle aquatic green. I liked the contrasts of smooth striated boulders, lightly rippling water and its larger repetition in the foreground beach.
- 04 BARRA | Traigh Eais | A cliff gully opens into a beach pool
Near the end of the beach a narrow gully cut through the high rock formation into this deeper pool over light sand and stone reflecting the blue of the sky.
- 05 BARRA | Traigh Eais: tide washed patterns in speckled grey sand
On this day much of the strand was off-white sugar sand and absolutely flat but shading to grey close to its northerly cliffs. Flowing water had sculpted ripples into areas such as that in Image 3. Elsewhere, water and sand movements had created these flow patterns as one would expect to find on any beach.
- 06 BARRA | Traigh Eais | A track leading to high ground and cliffs above the beach
A road lies on a narrow neck of dunes between the Cockle Strand beach of the airport and Traigh Eais to the west. This daisy strewn grass track runs from it towards the cliffs to the northwest.
- 07 BARRA | Eoligarry (Eolaigearraidh) | Blue sheet metal cladding on a derelict lorry trailer
As I walked to Eoligarry Church from Traigh Eolis I passed this derelict lorry trailer in strikingly weathered blue paint. My liking for rust, decay and abstract expressionism required an image!
- 08 BARRA | Eoligarry | St Barr’s Church (Cille Bharra) with silhouetted gravestones
The first chapel on the site was dedicated to St Finbarr in the 600s. Two sidewalls remain from a church thought to date from around 1100. Close by are fragments from a possibly 15C building. The structure in this image is the current chapel which may have been built in the 1500s. It contains an altar, a replica of a unique carved Christian-Nordic Runic Stone from the 900s, medieval grave slabs from the burial ground and space for a small congregation.
- 09 VATERSAY (Bhatarsaigh) | Eorosdail village, c.1906 abandoned in the 1970s
A road crosses the narrow neck of land between north and south Vatersay and backs beaches to east and west. In September 1853 an emigrant ship, the "Annie Jane", sailed from Liverpool for Quebec carrying some 450 passengers and crew. Dismasted in bad weather it was driven ashore at this point on Vatersay. The 350 who died were buried in unrecorded mass graves. A monument was erected in 1881: see anniejane.net for its history.
- 10 VATERSAY | Eorosdail houses against a higher landscape
Eighteenth and nineteenth century economic developments and population movements including emigration, forced and otherwise, are recorded as the Highland Clearances. This village was established around 1906 after which the island’s population rose from around 12 to almost 300 (90 in the 2011 Census). Most incomers came from the islands of Mingulay and Berneray to the south, forced out by increasingly dire circumstances. Accounts of the "Vatersay Raiders" actions, their Edinburgh trial in 1908 and related social changes make up interesting reading.
- 11 VATERSAY | A detail of the stonework on one of the house gables
Eorosdail was finally abandoned in the 1970s after further house building in Vatersay village to the west. This detail shows the large coloured and pattered stone work from one of the gable walls whilst the previous images lend scale to their considerable size.
- 12 VATERSAY | Contemporary crushed and rusted corrugated iron
A rain shower had enriched the rust-reds on a scrap-pile collection including battered and torn corrugated iron.
- 13 VATERSAY | Corrugated iron cladding on the rear façade of an old cottage in Vatersay village
These corrugated iron sheets under fading blue paint covered the entire rear wall of an uninhabited stone cottage as protection from the Atlantic weather.
- 14 VATERSAY | Fading murals on a garden outbuilding in the village
This small painted shed was set back from the road behind a village house. The composition and style of the imagery appealed as did the weathered paint. I deliberately cropped the image to its edges to exclude distractions beyond. I gather that its two windows have now been re-instated, the door replaced and the whole painted in plain colour.
- 15 VATERSAY | A painted gable to a village house
In his 1993 book, Hebridean Images, photographer Iain McGowan describes "spotty houses" as a Western Isles building practice of applying white paint to the pointing around unpainted stones. Here, both mortar and stone are strikingly painted in black and white. It’s a simple cottage with a central porch and door flanked by two windows with dormers above. I must have seen other examples in earlier travels but I don’t seem to have another photograph. He also mentions "pudding and plain" houses which sound both appetising and mystifying.
- 16 BARRA | Halaman Bay: a stone cairn on the rocky headland to the south of the Bay
Walking west from Castlebay it’s a short distance to Halaman Bay where the road turns north above a long sweep of sand. I spent two late evenings on this headland watching waves breaking over the rocks below whilst awaiting glorious sunsets. Three boulders, ground hugging plants and a robust cairn stand on the bed rock south of the bay, their already warm tones enhanced by the last of the sun.
- 17 BARRA | Halaman Bay: a detail from the headland’s rock strata
Fractures in the bedrock exposed a cross section of its structure, patterns and colours.
- 18 BARRA | Halaman Bay: the most colourful sunset
Facing west over the unbroken Atlantic I’d hoped, and expected, to see at least one modest sunset but this was the best that any of the days managed. From my week of travel in western Scotland I didn’t record any so I was either out of luck or just not paying attention. Colour and black and white photographs of ships and boats at Mallaig and Oban are in two adjacent galleries. In 2019 I’ve yet to return for another tour of the west coast by train, bus, ferry and feet as imagined in their notes.