Travelling in the Western Isles

Jim Henderson continues his account of a summer trip

The hotel in Barra is a refurbished church building, and one of the customers enjoying a meal was the parish priest who featured in the TV programme about Barra and Vatersay. The island’s airport is a hut on the cockleshell beach at Eoligarry, where we waited to see the arrival of the noon flight. The little aeroplane came over the hill and dipped towards us then landed neatly beside the hut – but flight times have to suit the tides, as there are often times when the beach is under water.

The link road to Vatersay passes the scene where an aircraft crashed . Parts of the fuselage were left in memory of the crew who perished. Vatersay used to be a separate island, but a causeway was built in 1990, to help its tiny population survive. Despite this, it is a desolate place, with many white sand dunes and beautiful beaches. The ruins of several old houses stand there, an indication of how impossible life must have been in a tiny place, cut off from Barra by a stretch of sea that, though short, would not have been navigable in the winter storms.