May 22, 2015

"This isn't a fancy place here," said the young woman behind the counter in Church Street Fish and Chips. This was after I asked for ice water and she told me they had no ice.

We learned she is just graduating from college with a degree in computer repair. She said she moved here about 10 years ago from Liverpool and, no, she doesn't know any of the Beatles.

The young woman worked with Maggie, who is probably in her 50s. She said she went to London once, but she had no more desire to travel. "I have everything I want right here," she said. "My children, grandchildren. I don't want to go anywhere else."

This is Stornoway, the biggest city in the Isle of Lewis, with 7,500 inhabitants--one third the population of the entire island. Its sister city is Pendleton, South Carolina.






I had packed rain boots because Tom had warned me that the ground is soggy. While I was walking up to see the Callanish Standing Stones today, a man coming the other way said, "My, those are some colorful Wellies [Wellingtons, i.e., boots.] Maybe I'll start a trend here.

 Some believe these standing stones are in the shape of a Celtic cross. I can see it, but the stones have been there for more than 4,000 years--almost 2,000 years before the birth of Christ.When Tom and I drove down the east coast of the Isles of St. Lewis and Harris this afternoon, we saw the countryside has the same barren, austere look as much of the highlands. But here, the mountains reach farther into the sky, and lochs turn up just about everywhere we look. Of course, the ubiquitous sheep and their lambs wander into both the one-lane and two-lane roads, when they aren't nibbling on tufts of vegetation on the rocky soil.We also see where slabs of peat are gouged out of the earth. They're piled up to dry and eventually used as fuel. Too few trees grow on this island to make wood-burning practical.

Road signs feature the Gaelic name of towns or sites with the English version, in smaller type, below them.

At the lowest tip of the Isle of Harris is St. Clement's, a 16th-century church where a lot of MacLeods have been buried over five centuries. I think the early MacLeods were warriors. The sheep show their reverence for the MacLeod clan by pooping around all their tombs.

We're staying at the Caladh Inn in Stornoway. We have to pass a recreation room on our way to our room. Tom is particularly impressed with the snooker table. It's enormous, and apparently snooker is much more challenging than pool.