Coastalsurvey

Coasting to a stop beside the vans, I looked again at the waves. I wasn’t epic, but it was plausible and glittering in that lime-green hue, the waist-high waves looked like fun. I asked one of the surfers in the van when the water would reach high tide.

Emerald cove, Isle of Lewis

“It’ll be high in about an hour,” he said, “but ya want it low to mid tide, tha’s when it’s best.” He paused a minute to assess the newcomer on the bicycle. “Are you the bloke tha’s been riding aroun’ the island with a surfboard?”

“You mean there’s some other idiot towing a surfboard behind his bike?”

“Na, I think you’re tha only one.”

There were six surfers in all and two more arrived later. That, I found out, constituted eight-tenths of the surfing population of Lewis. One of the guys in the van was Derrick Graham, entrepreneur and owner of the only surf shop in the Western Isles. Derrick was an encyclopedia of local knowledge and, like every other Scottish boardrider I met, he seemed genuinely glad to meet another surfer.

Derrick said that the Internet wavecasts had predicted a swell to arrive in about three days. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d camp right here an’ wait for it.”

It seemed like sound advice, so after resupplying in Stonoway on Monday, I rode back to the cove on Tuesday morning. The trailer creaked and flexed under the extra weight of groceries and braking on the descents was slow and uncertain, however my gear and I arrived back at the cove intact. The only other living souls in sight were the sheep scattered over the steep green hills surrounding the inlet like so many grains of rice.

The tide was high, so I took my time setting up camp. When the tent was pitched taut and the kitchen arranged to my satisfaction, I walked the length of the beach looking for wood. The cove was small — less than a mile from the cliffs on the south to the bluffs on the north — and it faced northwest, the most consistent exposure for swell in the Hebrides, and because of the steepness of the surrounding hills the surface of the water was rarely troubled by wind. In short, it was a perfect jewel of a cove for surfing.

As the tide dropped, the swell began to form nice little peaks over the low ridges of rock hidden in the sand on the cove’s bottom. It was time to get wet. I dropped an armload of driftwood in the fire pit, shrugged into my wetsuit and paddled out to the sweetest looking peak in the bay. The waves were maybe shoulder-high and well shaped. The peak pitched over in a brief tubing section and then walled up for 100 yards before collapsing on some near-shore sandbars. The lefts were perhaps a bit longer than the rights, but they were both good.

Rights and lefts. Lefts and rights. I surfed until my arms were tired and I began to make sloppy mistakes. Even then I didn’t want to go in. Looking at the lowering sun playing on the hilltops and the kelp undulating two fathoms below my board, it seemed like payment with interest for all the miles logged and waveless days. For most city dwellers, places like the cove exist only in the imagination. It was hard to believe I had actually found such a place. In the end it was cold that sent me in. That was real enough: my hands were numb and I couldn’t grip the board properly.

That night the stars came out and the dreams began. In all of the nights I spent at the cove the dreams came in a torrent of vivid and strange scenes. It may have been the unfamiliar sounds like the advancing and retreating roar of the water punctuated by the bleating of sheep and the blurred pinpoint cries of gulls, or it may have been solitude that elicited the dreams, but each morning I awoke feeling as if I’d journeyed far through alien lands. During my waking hours long-forgotten pop songs surfaced with melodies intact and sappy lyrics rolling off my tongue. Sealsandcroftstheeaglesandqueentherubinoos and who knows what else played in a random order as if they were being transmitted from one of those indy stations you sometimes find on the car radio when driving across the hinterlands late at night. If I had stayed longer all of the detritus accumulated during a lifetime of American consumerhood might have unspooled there on that beach.

Unfortunately, by the end of the week the swell was fading and I packed up to continue riding south. It was a fine day for a ride. Biking across the relatively flat Isle of Lewis with a slight tailwind I made good time to Calanais. Calanais is the site of a Celtic stone circle, the largest such circle in the islands and one of the most ancient monuments in Europe.

The stones rise from a hilltop overlooking Loch Roag. There are smaller stone circles on two other hilltops stretching away to the south. Up close, the stones are smooth with a grain that makes them look like petrified wood. They were probably worn smooth by the elements and by being buried for thousands of years. It wasn’t until 1857 that the peat was cleared away and the rocks stood upright as they had when the Celts first raised them.

Archeologists estimate that the standing stones at Calanais were erected 5000 years ago, which makes them older than the Pyramids. It was an important ritual site for 1000 years and later a burial cairn was added to the circle that served as a communal tomb. Beyond that, no one really knows why the Celts built this thing or what they used it for.

I had a cappuccino at the nearby visitor center, checked out the Celtified kitsch in the gift shop and then rode off to the next stone circle in the chain. This smaller circle was reached by following a footpath from a crofter’s backyard, over a pair of stiles that bridged the wire fences on the moor and climbing a low hill. The stones here were half the size of the 20-foot sentinels in the main circle, but perhaps more impressive for their wind-swept isolation. I sat down among them and leaned back against the sun-warmed surface of one rock to eat my lunch.

The Callanish Stones, main circle

Later, on North Uist, I met an archeology buff from Manchester named Andrew. He had spent several weeks visiting all the ancient Celtic sites in the Western Isles (there are many other brochs, duns and cairns to see) and he told me that the Celts may have used the standing stones as celestial markers to fix the change of seasons, or they may have been places where rituals were held.

He had helped some local archeologists in the restoration of one stone circle. “It’s not easy getting those bloody stones to stand up either,” Andrew said. “It took five of us just to get this little stone into the hole and set up. I don’t know how they managed the larger stones.”

“An there was this other American there, a bloke named Chook [that's Chuck in Midlands] from Seattle, who was into building his own stone circles. Can you imagine how that would be 5000 years from now when they find ‘em? ‘This looks to be late twentieth century, built by a guy named Chook.’ ”

That afternoon, riding south into Harris, the weather turned bad. First came the headwinds, then the rain and then the hills of Harris. Most of the hills are about 2000 feet above sea level, but the road climbs up the flank of Clisham, which at 2621 feet is the largest of the lot. I reached the hostel at Reinigedal well after dark, soaked and thoroughly exhausted.

Reinigedal was another one of the Gatliff Hostels. The little whitewashed cottage is set in a hamlet on the shores of Loch Seaforth. It was only recently connected to the rest of the island by a road. Previously the only access was by boat or a 6-mile hike along the crags from Tarbert to the south. Fortunately there were a few free beds when I arrived, the coal stove was going and the showers were hot.

The next day the south wind blew harder and the rain flew across the rocky slopes of Harris in sheets. It was slow going. In Tarbert, population 500, I stopped at the first pub I saw.

Apart from the bartender, a chunky girl who looked about 15, there were only two other patrons in the place. I ordered a pint of McEwans and sat at the bar. There was a broad shouldered young man bent over a plate of food a few stools away and an older man with a bald pate and bright blue eyes seated next to him. They were talking in Gaelic. Of the 66,000 Scottish Gaelic speakers, over a third live in the Western Isles. I had heard the language spoken before at Barvas and it seemed like an indecipherable collision of vowels and consonants. I asked the bartender for a menu and she pointed to a slate on the wall where the day’s lunch items were written in red and yellow chalk.

“I’d recommend the creamed pork and chips,” said the young man at the bar, “it’s excellent.” It looked about as good as the other choices, so I ordered the same.

“Biking, are ye?” he asked between mouthfuls.

“Yea, and surfing too.”

“Oh, aye. I ride a kneeboard myself.”

His name was Bob, or that was the English equivalent of his Gaelic name, which sounded to me like “gahrg”. There wasn’t an English translation for the old man’s name so Bob just called him “Old Man.” Bob managed a salmon farm in one of the sea lochs nearby and the old man was a fisherman. We talked about salmon farming, surfing, New York and the dwindling fish stocks and by the time I’d finished my lunch, Bob insisted on buying a round of whisky.

In Scotland it’s bad manners to refuse a drink offered in friendship and worse not to reciprocate. So I got the next round, and Bob got the one after that. The chances of me biking into South Harris that Saturday afternoon were growing slimmer by the hour.

“An have ya met any lassies on this trip?” Bob wanted to know.

I had to admit that wearing the same clothes for a week at a time, not shaving, or bathing for days on end wasn’t a really good way to meet women. “Then you’ll want to stay right here,” Bob said. “All the lassies come here on a Saturday night.”

The old man leveled his cerulean gaze at me and nodded solemnly. “Aye,” he said, “lassies.”

Sometime later the door blew open and 20 young men tumbled in, shouting greetings and setting up pints on the bar. Bob seemed to know most of the newcomers and introduced me to the ones who sat at our table. The pub, which had been quiet before was now full of life. There was soccer on the television, a pool game going in the back and the old man began singing sea chanteys in Gaelic.

“Ach, Old Man, who ever told you you could sing?” Bob shouted across the table.

The old man paused and said, “I’ve won prizes for me singing,” before continuing the dirgelike tune.

“So, what is this a football club?” I asked nodding at the boisterous new arrivals.

“Nae, it’s a wedding party,” Bob said. “The tradition is ta hire a bus and visit all 27 pubs on Lewis an Harris in 24 hours.” Bob glanced around at the unsteady pool players and his friends who had joined Old Man in his Gaelic song. “An at tha rate they’re goin’, I say they’ll na’er make it.”

“Before you can pull the lassies, you’ll need ta clean up a bit,” Bob noted. “Have ya got a place to stay?” I didn’t, so Bob asked the bartender to make me a reservation at the Harris Hotel across the street. “Get yourself a shower and have a wee Scottish seista, and I’ll see ya back here this evening,” Bob said.

Somehow, I can’t recall exactly, I got myself over to the hotel and checked into room number 17. I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I remember is launching myself out of bed to get violently ill in the sink. Later that night I woke up and switched on the television. BBC 4 was showing a James Bond flick. I found this curiously consoling. The lassies could wait. Rule Britannia.

Visitors to Scotland’s Highlands and Islands will find a few grand fishing hotels or hunting lodges scattered around the countryside. The Harris Hotel was one of these fine establishments. Most of them were built in late 1800s when it became fashionable for the English aristocracy to go shooting and fishing in the Highlands. By and large they are constructed in the Scottish Baronial style and the interiors are a comfortable mix of floral carpets, faded wallpaper and fine china. In many of the villages where they’re found, the fishing hotel is the only drinking establishment and must cater to the local trade as well as their English guests. The Anglo-Scottish solution for this was separate facilities for each class.

Typically there are two separate bars with two separate entrances. One is the carpeted and quiet guests’ lounge where toffs from the south sip single-malts and bullshit with their ghillies about the day’s fishing, snipe hunting or deer stalking. The other is the public bar with its pool table, video machines and football trophies. The Harris Hotel was unusual in that it placed the two bars in separate buildings. So when I stumbled across the street from the bar to the hotel, I had crossed another kind of line as well.

That wasn’t apparent until the next morning when I walked into the dining room for breakfast. I had had better mornings and since I woke late, I pulled on the same bike shorts and rank T-shirt I had passed out in. Judging from the worried looks I received from some of the other guests, this was a very bad morning. I chose a small table beside the tall windows where I could watch the rain flatten the carefully tended flower beds outside.

“Excuse me sir, what room are ye in?” The waitress was another apple-cheeked plump girl done up in a pleated kilt and tartan shawl to look like Flora MacDonald.

“Um, room 17.”

“Could ya sit over here please? This table’s reserved.” After I sat down at the table in a dark corner of the dining room, the waitress seated a well-dressed old couple by the window. I helped myself to some juice and waited for Miss MacDonald to take my order.

“Looks a bit wet today, eh?” The gentleman at the next table looked up from buttering his scone to see if I had heard. He had white hair and a broad white mustache. In his pressed tattersall shirt he looked like a major in the British Army, enjoying his retirement.

“Yes, it does,” I said.

“Cycling?” the major inquired.

“Yes. Fishing?”

“Not today. The fishing hasn’t been much good around here for years. You’re American, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I see,” the major replied.

When it came, the breakfast was fine: eggs, toast, marmalade, yogurt, fruit, coffee, rashers of bacon, blood sausage, beans and two fried tomatoes. I ate it all; I would need every calorie. After breakfast I had a long, hot shower and a shave.

But when I left the hotel it was still raining. It was another Sunday morning and Tarbert was closed for the day. There was nothing left to do but ride. Alternately pushing and riding over the hills into South Harris, it seemed that the south wind had increased. The rain was falling horizontally across the moors and the sheep had taken shelter in the lee of rocky outcrops and ledges. In all I only traveled about 12 miles that day to a beautiful bay near Horgabost that Bob had told me about. There was no point in riding to Leverberg; the ferry to North Uist didn’t run on Sundays.

Monday cleared up a bit, but the south wind was still blowing hard. In the afternoon I caught the ferry across the Sound of Harris to a landing called Otternish on North Uist. I had heard there was a good hostel on Berneray, a tiny island just north of Uist that had been connected to the larger island by a causeway in 1998. So when I rolled off the boat at Otternish, I turned north onto the bridge and let the wind blow me down Berneray’s winding road to the hostel.

The rain began again just as I was riding across the fields to the cluster of low thatch-roof cottages that was the Berneray hostel. A surfer in London had told me that Berneray’s western shore sometimes broke on the right swell and, after I’d set my gear down on a bunk in the hostel, I went for a look. Berneray is a small Island. You could walk its circumference in a day and be back where you started in plenty of time for dinner. Soon I stood on a hilltop looking down on the island’s western shore. There were no waves, only the grey islands of Boreray and Pabbay rising out of the sea mist. I turned and trudged back through the wet grass and sheep shit to the hostel.

That night the storm closed in. It rattled the windows and turned the sea beyond the cottages white with foam. Inside the hostel we had the coal stove stoked and the whisky on the table. Like the other Gatliff hostels it was a rustic and friendly place with a casual atmosphere. Unlike the other hostels I had visited, all of the guests were men. The evening, however, passed quickly with a few games of cards and a lot of storytelling.

The next morning the gale was still howling. It was so dark outside that it was hard to tell where the night left off and the day began. One of the other cyclists attempted to pedal to North Uist. He got as far as the causeway before he gave up and rode the wind back to the hostel. I decided it would be a good day to stay inside and read. That afternoon cocktail hour began just after lunch and continued on into the evening.

On the fourth day I waited until after lunch to make my escape. The weather hadn’t improved, but I had to go. I was beginning to feel like an extra in the sequel to Withnail and I, and another day of tea and whisky would have paralyzed me.

Riding into a 30-knot headwind made Uist’s nearly flat terrain seem like a long climb up an endless hill. I paused in the ascent a few times to check out beaches on the northwestern shore that were rumored to have waves. They did: gnarly storm surf that was better left unridden. It was nearly dark when I rode down another side road to a beach in a nature preserve. There, not far from the ruins of an old kirk and a cemetery, I found a little stone building. It was the visitor center to the nature preserve and the door was open. The floor was cold concrete, but it was dry inside and out of the wind. I slept there that night and considered myself lucky to have found the place.

The weather broke the next morning. It was only a respite between fronts, but it gave me a chance to ride across Benbecula and into South Uist. I spent a few days on South Uist checking out the beaches. None of them had waves — shallow water offshore and a series of reefs seemed to block most of the swell.

Barra was the last stop on my tour. I caught the ferry from Lochboisdale on a Sunday morning and arrived in Castlebay before lunch. Barra is a predominantly Catholic island, so Sundays there are not as severe as Lewis or Harris. The town’s two pubs were open as were a couple of shops. I had been told there was also a bank with a cash machine at Castlebay, but I was misinformed.

That was inconvenient. However, I had four pounds sterling in my pocket, three days worth of food and five soggy cigarettes so I rode out of Barra to Vatersay. Vatersay is the southernmost inhabited island in the Outer Hebrides. It was connected to Barra by a causeway built in 1990. My Ordnance Survey map showed a deep sandy cove on Vatersay’s western shore called Traigh Siar that was worth a look.

The road ended in a cul de sac surrounded by eight weather-beaten wooden houses. I guessed the beach was beyond the grassy dunes where cattle were grazing. I left the bike by the road, walked through an open gate and around the grazing cows until I came to the shore. Not having seen a weather report for a week or more, I was unprepared for what I found: perfect head-high surf pulsing into the bay. There was a stiff offshore breeze tearing mare’s tails of spray from the edges of the feathering waves. That was all I needed to see — I ran back to the road to get my gear.

The rain began again as I was paddling out into the bay. It was a little spooky skimming over the dark water at a place I’d never surfed before. I lined up with a crag on the southern end of the bay and waited. The rain made a hissing sound over the surface of the water and the grey clouds pressed down until the hilltops disappeared. I almost lost my nerve and paddled in, but the first ride changed my mind. It was fast and steep; worth repeating. Traigh Siar, Gaelic for “West Beach”. I would stay there and surf until the food ran out. The rest of the world could wait.

If You Go:

Ferries to and from the Hebrides are run by Caledonian Macbrayne Ltd.
Ask for the Island Hopscotch ticket.

You can get more information on the Calanais stones at Visit The Hebrides, or Undiscovered Scotland.

On North Uist, check out the Uist Outdoor Centre for kayaking, diving and surfing (ask for Angus). It’s in Lochmaddy. The centre provides accommodations, food, transportation and instruction. Ask about their dives on the wreck of the SS Politician. In February of 1941 the SS Politician en route to New Orleans ran aground off South Uist in a heavy fog. Her cargo included 24,000 cases of whisky, many of which were liberated by the islanders before Royal Customs blew up the wreck. The ensuing party was fictionalized in Compton MacKenzie’s book Whisky Galore.

Also on North Uist, a new hostel has opened. It’s called Taigh Mo Sheanair (My Grandfather’s House).

The Gatliff Hostels do not take reservations, but you are unlikely to be turned away. These old crofter’s cottages are one of the gems of the Hebrides.

Based in Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis, Hebridean Surf Holidays is your first stop for surf. They have accommodation, surf lessons, gear hire and transport to the breaks for reasonable fees.

For more information on the bike trailer, see the manufacture’s website: CYCLETOTE

Other sites of interest for visitors to Scotland include:

* The National Tourist Board
* Historic Scotland
* Shetland Island Tourism
* The National Trust for Scotland
* Cairngorms National Park
* The Malt Whisky Trail
* The Edinburgh Festivals
* Seabird Centre