Around Scotland with a Suit Part 2 - Barra

My bum was hurting. We’d been on the ferry for five hours and I’d run out of ways to kill time. For a simple Essex Boy, visiting Glasgow was already the ends of the earth. Going north to Oban was the ends of the ends of the earth. But five hours north west on a ferry? What would I find? A waterfall at the end of the world? A magical land of fairies and unicorns? What I found instead was the Isle of Barra, located at the southern tip of the Outer Hebrides, sticking out into the North Atlantic and a long way from anywhere.

It was evening when we arrived and we stayed with Lucy’s dad who is building a house there. That doesn’t mean he’s got massive teams of people doing it, and he pokes his head in from time to time. He’s actually building a house himself. A proper, actual, big, proper house on a remote island. I struggle putting together something from Ikea. The stairs hadn’t been put in yet, or the internal walls for that matter so we slept in sleeping bags on top of some wall insulation. I was still lugging around my suit, which had never seemed quite so out of place. Even though much of the house was still only a shell, it still stayed warm and dry inside, despite having no heating, which is testament to good British engineering. With a little help from the Swedish.


Waking up in Barra was a revelation. The house is perched on a hill and from my window I could see the sea with little islands in the distance, sandy beaches in the foreground, and the whole settlement (the word ‘town’ isn’t really appropriate) around us. After some breakfast we went for a long walk and I was amazed. Barra has beaches that rival tropical islands. One of them, Tràigh Mhòr, also doubles as the runway for Barra Airport and is the only place in the world to have scheduled flights landing on the beach (subject to tides). There’s sand dunes. There’s huge hills that you can climb up and see the whole island from. There’s wildlife everywhere. It’s stunning. I haven’t been somewhere that shows off so much with nature since I went to New Zealand. I was particularly lucky while I was there that weather, although windy, was warm and sunny. The weather can often be pretty terrible and it’s this, together with the remoteness of the island that stops it from being flooded with tourists as it probably deserves.

But the landscape isn’t the island’s only attraction. There’s also the people. There’s only a thousand or so people spread out across Barra, but they make up for it with a quirky personality that goes a long way. For a start, like many small communities, everybody knows everybody else’s business. Added to that is that fact that Barra is the traditional home of the Clan MacNeil and a good proportion of the islanders are MacNeils making them not only neighbours but family. In a community where someone from a neighbouring island is considered an exotic outsider, being from London might as well have been from Tokyo. And just maybe, it’s this isolated ecosystem mixed with a small genetic pool that makes them a little bit crazy. Walking along one of the beaches under a cliff you’ll find bits of old cars sticking out of the sand, like the newly discovered remnants of an ancient civilisation. It turns out that disposing of an old broken down car on an isolated island is an expensive business. So locals took their old cars to the edge of the cliff and pushed them off. Job done. There’s also a golf course on Barra, which no one ever uses. When I asked why, I was told that there’s an aggressive bull that lives on it who chases off any would-be golfers. Apparently no one has thought of a successful way to market a combination of golf and ‘the running of the bulls’.

While spending time here I would often hear about the peculiarities of island life. In the absence of public transport, people would grab a lift with the local postman who seemed to operate some kind of ad-hoc bus service. Lucy’s dad said that he once drove 10 miles to Castlebay on the other side of the island to visit the island’s (only) shops. When he returned to his car his post had been left on his seat by the postman who had recognised his car. There’s one restaurant (a café that specialises in Indian food), one small supermarket, one tiny shop that sells everything, and a couple of other bits and bobs. Everything else comes from visiting vans (the library van, the bank van, the fish van and the mobile cinema) or a long trip to the mainland. If you need anything done it will take time, and there’s not much you can do about it so you might as well stop worrying and chill out. It takes two or three days to get into island life, but once you do it pretty much takes your stressful, busy urban life, and laughs in its face.

By the time we’d left, returning to Oban seemed like the big city. By the time we arrived back in London much later that day, I was overwhelmed. It took a while for my urban defences to reboot. It had been an amazing journey through Northumbria and Scotland, and I had discovered and learnt a lot. And more importantly my suit had survived the trip. I’ll be back in Barra one day. And hopefully next time, the house will have walls.