By the sea > Articles > Island Life on Scotland's Edge

Just getting to the Outer Hebrides is part of the fun, the little twin-prop from Glasgow skimming in a few feet above the sea before setting its wheels down onto the sand of the Cockle Strand, the wonderfully-named beach that's been the airport on the island of Barra since the 1930s.

Sheep ambled along the main street of the island's tiny main town, Castlebay, as we drove up to our hotel. Dinner in the Castlebay Hotel's dark wood-panelled lounge bar was fresh scallops and wonderfully smoked haddock while we gazed at the shifting twilight on the harbour where Kisimul Castle was a shadow out on its tiny islet in the bay.

Later, we joined half of Barra crammed into the Castlebay Bar. Everyone is shouting and reeling, not just from the booze (large whiskies for £1.20, sweet Jesus) but also the stirring efforts of the Vatersay Boys belting out raucous standards in one corner. A few more drinks and we might have joined the people jigging unsteadily on the tables.

Also known as the Western Isles, the Outer Hebrides are scattered in a 150-mile long chain at Europe's north-west corner. Only a handful of the islands are inhabited, though, and even on these, empty single lane roads are like grey threads dropped gently onto the ochre and green moorland, "passing places" every few hundred yards making little sashays to the left and right.

As well as heather-covered moors and dark peat-bogs, you'll find a string of stunning sandy beaches, wilderness surf spots when the Atlantic rollers pile in but at other times perfect places to walk, watching for seals or eagles looking down at the wildflower-covered grass - known as machair - which backs the sand.

While the whites and blues of the coast can be startlingly bright, the moors echo the famous Harris tweed made trendy by the likes of Vivienne Westwood and shoemaker Jimmy Choo, its patterns and colours inspired by sea-pinks, ragwort and harebells dappled onto green and brown.

The lochs and moors also draw the huntin' set, well-served by gamey boltholes like the Lochboisdale Hotel on the southern tip of South Uist - taxidermed decor, huge scales in the hallway to measure the day's catch and old record books chronicling dead animal tallies decades back in faded ink.

For rugged sophisticates, though, there's hotels and restaurants that perfectly embody the estate agents' credo of "location, location, location". While many get by with being plain and decent, others are good enough to demand long advance booking for a room or table in summer.

The Hebrides are paradise, too, for soulful wanderers. The young Prince Charles came to Berneray, off the tip of North Uist, to pick summer spuds for a local crofter, but there are enough special places here for everyone.

The most famous site are the Callanish Standing Stones on their Lewis hilltop, but everywhere there’s lonely crofts and old "black houses" with their peat-fired smoky interiors, ancient fortified towers (the best at Carloway on Lewis), tiny piers pointing the way to the next island, and poignant little museums of island life in the otherwise uninspiring townships.

Film fans, meanwhile, can see the remains of the once whisky-laden SS Politician just off Eriskay, whose sinking in 1941 inspired Compton Mackenzie's yarn Whisky Galore!, then toast the writer amid wreck memorabilia in The Politican pub in the village of Baille. The man himself is buried just across the water at Cille-Bharra on Barra.

On our last full day, we drove the Golden Road (so-called because of the cost of building it) across the eerie landscape of The Bays on the east coast of Harris. Scoured by ancient glaciers, it looks like a place where God downed tools, leaving nothing but bare rock to face the sea pushing into the jagged coves.

You get the feeling, though, that he's still hanging around these parts - listening to the Gaelic, walking the beaches, enjoying the seafood, chilling as he admires one of his better efforts.

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