Qualla: Lewis

Lewis: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexbrn, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lewis is what an island looks like when most of it is bog. From the air the land is the colour of damp tobacco, with the silver of thousands of small lochans pricked across it and a green fringe of crofting townships hugging the coast. The interior is largely uninhabited. The people, almost twenty thousand of them at the last count, are gathered in villages along the sea, and overwhelmingly in Stornoway, which is the only town for fifty miles in any direction. Lewis is the northern two-thirds of the third-largest island in the British archipelago; only Great Britain and Ireland are bigger. Harris is the rugged southern third. For most of recorded history the two halves were connected only by boat. Even today, you cross the dividing hills on a single climbing road that feels like a frontier.

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Image: Alexbrn | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lewis: Stornoway and the Roads That Lead Out

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Stornoway is the only place on Lewis with a supermarket, the only place with stand-alone bars, the only place with a hospital, and the obvious base for everything else. Its sheltered harbour has been a refuge for ships for as long as there have been ships in these waters. The fer...

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Image: Public domain

Lewis: Standing Stones and Older Bones

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marta Gutowska, CC BY 2.5. On the west coast at Callanish, thirteen meters of grey gneiss rise out of the moor in patterns laid down nearly five thousand years ago. The main circle and its associated lines of stones predate Stonehenge, and they remain in some ways more mysterious because no one ever wrote ...

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Image: Marta Gutowska | CC BY 2.5

Lewis: The Land Raiders

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Baird, CC BY-SA 2.0. Through the nineteenth century the Highland Clearances and a series of famines emptied huge stretches of Lewis. Landowners turned the cleared ground over to sheep, to deer stalking, and to grouse moors. The crofters who remained were forced onto cramped, infertile patches near th...

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Image: David Baird | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lewis: Gaelic, Sabbath, and the Wind

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nachosan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around sixty percent of islanders still speak Gaelic; road signs put Gaelic first, English second and smaller. The Sabbath is taken more seriously here than almost anywhere else in Britain. Until very recently the Sunday ferry was banned. The Lewis chessmen, walrus-ivory pieces c...

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Image: Nachosan | CC BY-SA 3.0