Day 5: Butt of Lewis

At the Butt of Lewis

 Today was a bit cooler and a bit cloudier, but dry so not too bad.  We decided to head up the west coast to the Butt of Lewis - the most Northerly point on the island, with the title of windiest place in Britain.  We packed up all our warm clothes ready for the onslaught of wind.

It was quite a dreary drive, through slightly undulating peat bog and through tired looking villages (no picturesque white cottages here).  One piece of excitement, we finally found some Highland cows.  There were only 3 of them, and they all had their back to us, but they were there and were splendid.

The local wildlife

We got to the Butt of Lewis, got out of the car and discovered not even a whisper of a breeze!  Nothing at all, we couldn't believe it - we were all wearing our warm clothes for no reason.  Oh well. There is a working lighthouse at the Butt and it is famous for spotting a whole heap of sea birds, but we only saw seagulls (mind you we aren't great at spotting other birds so we may have missed them).

We stayed a while to take photos and wait for the famous wind (no luck) before heading back towards Stornoway.  We stopped off at the only cafe on the road - Comunn Eachdraidh Nis, which was a Community building which had been turned into a museum and had a cafe at the back.  It was both weird and great at the same time.  The cafe was full of old people eating huge cream teas, however, when we looked at the menu cream tea certainly wasn't on it.  Each table was laid with a tea service - china cups, saucers, side plates etc.  All very 'old person' if you ask me, but the waitress was young, and the menu very very reasonably priced.  Tom had a pizza for £1.20 - a decent sized pizza with side salad - not sure they are here to make a profit?  I had a toastie and Matt a Scotch broth.  We then finished up with 2 slices of very good sponge cake.  We then looked around the museum which was actually quite well done and quite interesting.  It was free entry (of course -you don't seem to have to pay for anything here) and a nice interlude.

Not looking at you!

We carried on our way back to the cottage, stopping at a stone circle and a 20ft monolith.  Strange thing about the monolith, next door to it was a cottage, which was obviously inhabited by Israelis - they had the Israeli flag up, and each window had a poster / embroidery / other art work all in Hebrew.  Not what you would expect in a lonely corner of an Outer Hebridean island.

20 foot standing stone

We returned to the cottage, had showers, watched some Olympics and then headed to Stornoway in search of dinner.  We ended up at An Lanntair - the arts centre, where we had great nosh.  Freshly made fish and chips for the lad, pork & beef burger with cheese and black pudding for Matt and a wonderful seafood chowder full of juicy morsels of fish for me.  We left happy.