Steel Pulse’s ‘Round Scotland’ Log 2006

At the end of Week 3 we had got as far as Stornaway, the main town on the Isle of Lewis. Its name comes from the Norse and means ‘The Bay to Steer For’.

Week 4 Map

On Monday 24^th we celebrated the start of our 4^th week with a lazy day; we just had a stroll through the town and around to the grounds of Lews Castle, to the Sports Centre for a shower and to the Stornaway Fish Smokers for a pair of kippers! We also arranged to hire a car the following day.

On Tuesday we set off in the hire car, a small red Nissan Micra, to the west side of Lewis. The first stop was at the Shawbost Norse Mill and Kiln, which had been recently restored. The mill had a side stream of a river that ran underneath it and turned a paddle wheel in the horizontal plane, which was attached to the upper grinding stone. The adjacent kiln was used for drying the oats and barley, prior to grinding.

Shawbost Norse Mill

The next stop was at the Gearranan Blackhouse Village, a group of old ‘black houses’ which had been kept in tact as a cultural exhibition of what village life was like in the rural communities. Two of the houses are fitted out, as they would have been at the time of their abandonment in the 1940s. The black houses were used to house the family at one end and their animals at the other. Originally they had a central fire in the living room, but these had the fire at the gable end and had windows fitted. The roof was similar to the mill above.

Detail of roof weights

A bit further down the road was the Carloway Broch, which is an Iron Age structure dating back over 2000 years. It is built with two concentric walls, with passages and staircases in the voids.

Carloway Broch

Very impressive, but the best was yet to come. A few miles further brought us to the Callanish Standing Stones. They are formed in the shape of a cross, with a circle in the centre, with a small chambered cairn. There is an avenue, or double line, of stones to the north, and to the south, east and west has a single line of stones.

Callanish Standing Stones

There are three other standing stone circles in the area, which haven’t been fully excavated yet. The stones above were only fully uncovered in the 1850s, when up to 1.5m of peat was removed from around the stones.

On Wednesday we departed from Stornaway, after refilling the fuel and water tanks, and headed east to the mainland coast and our planned anchorage of Loch Nedd. A Dutch boat that arrived on Tuesday had complained about the fog and shortly after leaving the Lewis coast we were enveloped in fog and this lasted all the way across until approaching the entrance to Loch Nedd. We passed through a group of trawlers on the way across and were again glad the boat was fitted with radar.

Loch Nedd turned out to be a lovely surprise. Shaped like a long sock, it was very sheltered once you turned into the ‘foot of the sock’. Day boat users drifted away leaving us on our own during the evening – quite a contrast to the trawlers arriving into and leaving Stornaway during the night. On the hills behind we could see a female deer grazing, being followed by her young suckling offspring.

When we got up the following morning we were enveloped in thick fog in the anchorage, but by the time we finished breakfast it lifted sufficiently to see the entrance of the loch – so we decided to push on, hoping it would continue to lift. Fallback option was to put into Kinlochbervie, if the thick fog lingered.

As we progressed north up the coast it continued to clear ahead of us – initially a few hundred yards, then a quarter of a mile and finally it drifted away to around 5 miles. It turned out to be a very pleasant motor up past the entrance to Kinlochbervie and later we could make out the lighthouse at Cape Wrath, but there was a bank of fog lingering to the north.

Approaching Cape Wrath, with fog bank beyond

As we came level with the west side of Cape Wrath we were enveloped in pea-soup fog. Again we had to resort to use of the radar and chart plotter, initially to pass inside the isolated Duslic Rock, just north of Cape Wrath and then later as we crossed through the ‘Firing Practice Area’ marked on the chart, assuming they wouldn’t be doing any target practice in thick fog.

Halfway through this area there was an almighty BOOM, followed by a metallic crack as an underwater shockwave hit the hull. Jaws dropped! Then another BOOM and a sharp crack. Should we don lifejackets or flack jackets? A very hasty VHF call to the target range safety vessel confirmed that there was no target firing, but that they had just let off some underwater explosives. Anxiety levels receded on hearing that.

Going into Loch Eriboll the fog lifted a bit as we got closer to the land, but it lingered around the first possible anchorage in Rispond Bay. So we headed down the Loch to the next anchorage marked in the chart on the north side of Ard Neackie. The anchor filled with weed and wouldn’t hold, so we tried the bay to the south and had three attempts there before going further down the loch to Camas an Duin, where we managed to anchor in 13m at our first attempt. Closer in was full of moorings and immediately to the west was a fish farm.

On Friday 28^th we were up early to make best use of the tide going east along the coast to Scrabster. Anchor was lifted at 0710 and by 0815 we left Loch Eriboll heading east. The Coast Guard forecast at 0820 implied Saturday and Sunday would be stronger winds, so we altered course and instead headed direct to Stromness in the Orkney Islands. Entry into Stromness is via the Holm Mouth, which has currents of up to 8kn and some shallow pinnacles in the narrowest part, which throws up some serious eddies. The Pilot Guide states that it should only be attempted at slack water, which would be at 1930.

Enroute we spotted a minke whale and (for our first time) a pod of white-beaked dolphins.

We arrived off Rora Head at 1445, just south of the Old Man of Hoy. The chart indicates that this coast has not been surveyed, so we had to keep a reasonable distance off, even though it has steep cliffs. When we passed the Old Man of Hoy we were recounting seeing the Chris Bonnington climb on TV, when we noticed a climber standing on the top of the rock, just visible in the photo below.

The Old Man of Hoy

We then spent the rest of the afternoon slowly motoring along the coast until we could get in on the start of the east-going flow into Stromness. At the marina we were met by the berthing master, with a bundle of tourist information and details of the marina facilities – very efficient!

Saturday 29^th was another lazy day – showers, laundry, cooked breakfast ashore and a wander around the town. We tried to hire another car for the following day, but the earliest we could get one was Monday.

The main street through the old area of Stromness

And Sunday was another lazy day of sorts – except for writing up the Week 3 & 4 logs!!