All Things Scottish, Days 15-16

The original plans for the trip had me staying in Edinburgh for the last two days, but early on I decided to forego the citiy visits, to extend the opportunity for better weather in those parts of the country where I wanted to be outside.

So for the last days, I skipped the Big City, instead arranging a trip out to the small Isle of Barra, in the Outer Hebrides (see it at http://goo.gl/maps/j1F8.) A few things in Barra interest me:

• Its airport (code BRR) is the only airport in the world that uses a beach as the runway, and operates scheduled flights.
• The isle is the seat of Clan MacNeil, which represents that patrilineal Scottish heritage I do have
• It's a remote, out-of-the-way place, on the far western tip of Scotland

To get there, I had booked the daily flight from Glasgow, which flies direct to Barra on a small de Havilland DHC6 Twin Otter plane, which is designed for short and rugged operations on beaches, gravel landing strips, frozen lakes, and similar. These planes run two flights a day to Barra, on the Glasgow-Benbecula-Barra triangle.

The flight times are of course aligned with low tide at Barra, so the flights can actually land. On Monday, this corresponded to a 2PM arrival. The flight to Barra was through nice weather with broken and scattered cloud, so I got a very good look at western Scotland and the Inner Hebrides as I flew the 55 minute hop.

Arriving in Barra it was windy and overcast, but the cloud cover was high enough to get a good view of the airport and beaches coming in. For some interesting videos from the flight, landing, and takeoff, see my SmugMug gallery:


While in Barra I visited Kisimul Castle , the stronghold of the clan, but the weather had turned rainy and nasty. Plans for a evening climb of Heavel, the highest point on the isle at around 380M, were cancelled, and I walked to the west side of the isle to spend the night at the Isle of Barra Beach Hotel.

This hotel is one of those idealistic designs from the late 70s but is a nice facility, with direct access to a nice beach and dunes. I went for a long stroll (in the rain) and then came back for a nice dinner of local seafood.

In morning the weather had not improved so there was little opportunity to go out and walk the inland of the island (which is very similar terrain to Iona.) What I did do was backtrack to the dune area, and recover the fleece hat I had lost the previous evening. This is the 2nd item I have lost on this trip, and been able to recover by backtracking to where I had been previously (not along a path.)

Hat recovered, weather worsening, I stayed the morning reading in the seaside (indoor, dry, heated, wifi-enabled) lounge of the hotel. Around 1PM I headed out to catch the bus back to the airport -- two busses run a loop around the island every two hours, so you just need to wait and flag one of them down. So I wandered up to the north end of the island, walked around the beaches there (Eoligarry on the west side, and of course the airport beach on the east side) and eventually caught the 4:20PM flight back to Glasgow.

The bad weather seemed isolated to Barra since, again, the flight was clear and scenic. Back in Glasgow, there was nothing left to do but head to the chain motel in Edingburgh for the night, and catch the midday flight back to London and Toronto the next day.