HopSctoch (Part 3): To the Sheep

Dearest, Darlingest Sheep:

       It's a little difficult  to say this. Sometimes words just aren't enough, but for now it will have to do. Dear, beautiful, fluffy sheep... I love you. I do, honestly! I know you might not believe me, because somehow in Scotland they take you all for granted (maybe because there are sheep almost everywhere...), and they don't seem to appreciate you the way you deserve, but this New Yorker sees you in a way the silly locals just don't. I love your fluffy tails, lopped or long or in between, and I love the way your silky black ears swivel at my approach. I love the way your little paws (yes, I know they are technically hooves, but somehow paws is cuter) clip along over the peat, and I love the way your little dark faces half disappear into the long grass when you graze. I love the way your hoarse Baaaahs sound like alarms, mama ewes, when I come too close to your babies, and I love the way tiny droplets of water catch in the thickness of your fuzzy coats when it begins to rain. The way you stare at us, bold and challenging and unafraid, might be attributed to stupidity by lesser people, but I know better, and your curiosity is charming. I wonder what the world looks like through your yellow eyes, and whether you appreciate the aesthetic contrast of your snowy flanks against the green of Scotland's hills. Dearest, loveliest sheep, you are simply too cute for words.

Some people, dear sheep, place the blame for the changes in the highlands in the 18th century at your delicate feet. You see, the small crofts of the common folk were converted into large farms by the landlords who wanted more profit from their property, and that meant that people were kicked out and replaced with your ruminant ancestors, oh fuzzy ones. In fact, 1792 was called the Year of the Sheep because there were so many of your distant kin brought into the Highlands, showing that the land owners really did not regard their tenants well at all, though they did not take you for granted it seems... Not fair for people to blame you though, is it? How on earth anyone could be angry with such adorable personifications of quadrupedal innocence, I cannot imagine. Don't take it too much to heart, dearest sheep - you know that I love you.

Up on the Carloway crags about the Blackhouse village, your sure-footedness was proven as you leapt lightly over bogs that pulled at my boots and rocks slippery with peat mud. I only wish you had been trotting toward us, instead of away. Your fluffy hindquarters with their splashes of identifying paint receding into the distant made my heart ache - I need you in my life, dear sheep! If only you little lambs were trusting enough to let me pet your wooly sides and scratch between your knobby little horns, and feed you more of that emerald clover you seem to like so much... Alas, it was not to be. But though we must be parted now, dear sheep, I hold you in my heart forever, never to be replaced. May your creamy coats grow thick to furnish many a tweed loom, and may the banks and braes of Lewis be forever graced with your presence.

Love,
Carly

HopScotch (Part 2): Long Live the Weeds and the Wilderness

And also, long live Peter and Theresa Wormald.

Peter and Theresa, the couple who shared our room in the Stornoway hostel, are in their late fifties. Peter is going grey, skin weathered and lined with life and sun. Theresa's hair is completely white, her cheeks rosy and her movements energetic, though careful. They are former teachers at a high school level academy - Peter taught chemistry, while Theresa took biology and psychology. It was a good school too, Peter told us as we chatted in the common room one evening. "We sent our own children there," he said. "That's how you know a school is really worthwhile - if the staff send their kids there too." He laughed a little at that. Both he and his wife have the patient, cheerful demeanor of those rare, excellent teachers who can convince even sullen teens that science is worth learning, and Theresa's mischievously twinkling grin and Peter's kind humor made Carly and I think that their students must have loved them. They aren't the the types to laze about in their retirement though, Peter told us, and are keeping busy instead.

Peter took a breath. Also, he told us, he has cancer.

"I'm not the type to sit around and wait for bad things to happen to me," he said matter-of-factly. Ordinarily, when one is diagnosed with Advanced-stage Prostate Cancer, the not sitting around involves living out a bucket list of places to go, things to see, before the disease takes hold. But for Peter and, by extension, Theresa, it goes beyond that. "I wanted to put some money back into the coffers," Peter said, referring to Macmillan Cancer support group who had helped him and Theresa during the early stage of his diagnosis. "I'm still strong, I still feel healthy," he said, and then launched into an explanation of the Grand Plan. To raise awareness and money for the Macmillan group, he and Theresa decided to bicycle across the western isles - all the way up the Outer Hebrides, from the southernmost tip of Barra to the north of Lewis, 25 miles a day or more (with saddlebags on the bikes, and a trailer, over mountains). It comes to a grand total of about 500 miles in less than three weeks, a truly staggering number for athletes in any stage of life, but more particularly when one considers the slightly advanced age and health of the pair. Awed and not a little intimidated, Carly and I hesitantly enquired if they did this sort of thing often, wondering what sort of herculean folk were sharing our room. "No, we've never done a bike trip like this," Peter replied rather, shrugging easily. "We've hiked around the highlands for years, but this is the first bike trip." "Wow. Wow." was all we could say in response. At this point they had already made it past their initial goal  of 200 miles, and, after reaching the end of Lewis, they had turned around and were now on their way back south to the Tarbert ferry, across Skye, heading home.

The glasses Peter wears are thick and round, and made his eyes look even larger and more expressive than perhaps usual; as he told us about their trip his eyes behind his spectacles shone with a determined light. "We keep sending back texts to report how we are doing, and the support we get, the responses, are really encouraging." Peter smiled. "I thought we would crash after the first hundred miles or so, but we just keep going!" We shook our heads in amazement, silently sure that we would have crashed, long before the first hundred miles. He told us about the contact at their old school who spreads the word of their progress to the rest of the staff. "The fellow whom I text always tweaks things when he tells everyone else, just to make it a bit funnier. So, we haven'st stopped in Stornoway to rest and explore - instead it's so Theresa can do the washing. He seems to be under the impression that her life consists largely of washing and ironing." He shrugged his shoulders in bafflement and laughed quietly.

When we returned from our Hebridean outing the next day, Theresa was sorting things in the room, sympathized with our sodden, half-frozen state, and recommended the hostel's tea. Once we were marginally warmer and could speak without our teeth chattering like mad, I chatted with her for a while about their trip. She asked about us as well, with delicacy and ease. As with her husband, it was incredibly easy to speak with her. Before she and Peter left for the evening she recommended that we visit the museum with the Lewis chessmen before we departed (thank goodness she said something or we might not have made it to see them!).

Carly and I sent the couple on their way before we left on Wednesday morning, watching in awe as they piled their lives into tiny saddlebags and a little trailer, and accoutered themselves to withstand the tumultuous island weather: waterproof pants, jackets, and coverings for their helmets, and even plastic shells for their shoes. The brims of their helmets shaded their faces, and the little yellow flag on the back of their trailer waves bravely in the breeze. We waved goodbye as they pedaled off, wishing that we were half as strong and courageous and crazy as these two delightful people. 

We watched for them all the windy, rainy way to Tarbert, knowing we would likely be taking the same road that they were, but we didn't see them. Praying that they had not drowned in the torrential rain that the sky hurled down at us all the way across Harris, we eventually arrived on Skye assuming that we would likely never see Peter or Theresa again. Incredibly, the next day as we drove about Skye on our grand tour of the north of the island, we caught sight of a pair of bikes and a cheery yellow flag waving just off the road. There, on a little bench overlooking the Uig harbor, sat our former roommates, Peter and Theresa, eating lunch and admiring the view. We nearly crashed the little car in our eagerness to turn around (driving on the wrong side of the road didn't help, but more of that later...) and we pulled off, and clambered out of the car, hoping to goodness we weren't intruding too much but unwilling to pass up this chance to once more wish them well. Likely a little amused at the silly Americans, the pair were still calm and gracious, and regaled us with tales of their harrowing ride across Harris the day before ("It was fine, except when we were having the kitchen sink thrown at us," laughed Theresa). Apparently a nice man in a truck had taken pity on the soaked couple halfway up a small mountain and had offered them a lift. They turned him down, though, after explaining they were doing the ride for charity, and he drove off, shaking his head. They ate their lunch huddled in the shelter of a bus stop, during some of the worst of downpour, and Carly and I stared at them wide-eyed, thinking almost guiltily of our cosy bus and dry ferry ride, not to mention the fact that rather than trusting our legs to get us around Skye, we had rented a car... They seemed undaunted by the weather, however, laughing a little at the ridiculousness of it all, and if they judged us for our automotive transportation they never let on.

"That is part of what makes the islands what they are," Theresa had said the day before, as I had griped about the incessant rain. If it were not for the weather, there would probably be more people and more tourists in the Hebrides, and the untamed wildness of the stretching moorlands would soon loose some of its empty beauty. "There is a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem about that, about the wildness of things," she said. "About how necessary the wildness is, in our world. Wild and wet, wild and wet... I don't remember the title." She smiled. "Look it up. That is the reason to come to the Hebrides, that wildness. Also, it's a beautiful poem."  I found it, eventually, and discovered that she was right. Long live the weeds and wilderness yet; long live the wild empty Hebrides; and long live Peter and Theresa Wormald, inspiring and stoic and strong.

Inversnaid
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.                                          Gerard Manley Hopkins

HopScotch (Part I): Or, Why Anyone Who Does Not Go To the Scottish Islands Is Seriously Missing Out

Finals were four days of worry, a week and a half of hell, then OVER, thank goodness. In celebration that we had somehow not been crushed beneath the weight of fifteen reference books, hundreds of articles and the sheer stress of sitting in a room with 150 other students and writing for two hours (the results of which largely determined one's entire grade...!) Carly and I decided we would take a Scottish islands trip to celebrate. It was one of those last-minute, no-idea-how-we-got-all-of-that-together, impulse decisions that just work out brilliantly, and I am so, so glad we made it. It was one of the best choices I made all semester, and I will try to do justice to it here, in brief. Carly my darling my dear, this is for you. :)

PART ONE: LEWIS

• On Monday, May 16th, Carly and I got up early and walked to St. Andrew's bus station, our long shadows misshapen by the bulging of backpacks that dwarfed us with their bulk. Literally, I think Carly's backpack was bigger than she was.
• We bussed north though the Highlands, mountain-faces scarred with mining and clearly planted evergreen forests, birchwoods thick with bracken and more lambs than we could coo over flashing past through rainstreaked windows... We passed brilliantly yellow gorse blossoms, glaring against dark, damp leaves, illuminated by the stormlight over the Cairngorm mountains. 
• Brief stop in Inverness - we staggered, stiff-legged, into an Indian place to get curry, because what else does one eat in the UK? - then got back on the bus toward Ullapool ("Uh-lah-pool"). 
• An Australian man with ginger eyebrows and salt-and-pepper hair seated in front of us turned up his hearing aid, the better to hear the sweet-voiced, petite old lady from Nottinghamshire seated next to him. The two held one of the most courteous conversations it has ever been my pleasure to accidentally overhear  - the garrulous old Aussie made the tiny woman laugh, tinkling and clear, when he made some joke about the thousand thousand sheep we passed as we kept on, moving north and north. Carly and I began to feel that we had been on a bus forever, our muscles aching from what we were convinced was atrophy...
• Starved and tired, we clambered off the bus in Ullapool, got our ferry tickets, and decided to stretch our legs with a short walk. The town was tiny  - two streets, maybe three? - but starkly lovely and somehow charming, and it quickly became one of the most beautiful places on earth when we smelled the fish and chips shop. Ohhh fried food smells like ambrosia and nectar sometimes, if you are hungry enough, and especially when said fried food is chips with salt and tons of vinegar. It was utterly delicious.
• We stepped aside at the bottom of a narrow, steep set of stairs on the ferry to let some people down, and an elderly fellow pattered past, holding the railings tightly and calling out a breathless 'thank you!' He was closely followed by another older fellow, who caught sight of us, and our styrofoam container of chips, halfway down. His eyes lit up. "Ooo-ooh-ooh!" He exclaimed, and rattled down a little faster, stretching out an age-spotted hand for our chips. Laughing, we pulled them aside, (we were not about hand over our precious chips - we had barely tasted them yet!) and with a dramatic, disappointed sigh he left, eyes still twinkling. Ten minutes and many, many vinegar-soaked chips later, Carly and I were seated in the front of the boat on very swanky padded seats, with a dramatic view of the grey sea and green hills before us. We were just about to get under way when I heard someone calling, "Jane!" I turned around, and saw the same portly gentleman, with the pink cheeks and bright eyes, stomach straining comfortably against the buttons of his shirt. He was addressing a dignified lady with elegantly coiffed silver hair sitting just across from us. "Come my love, we are sitting on the other side now," he said, pointing to a nearby set of seats. He must have caught sight of us as well, for when she enquired why he preferred to move, he replied, "Well, a cheeky young lady wont give me any of her chips and they smell too nice..." Carly and I laughed and blushed, and as his wife gathered her things, we offered him the chips. Scanning our faces quickly, he smiled, and said, "You know, I think I will; just a little one, just a little one..." Wide old fingers deftly pulling out a greasy chip, he popped it in his mouth, hummed in pleasure, and said "Enjoy the rest of your trip girls!"  
• A loud, rowdy group of high-school-aged boys sitting just behind us had apparently come from a football (soccer) tournament, where they had won first place (or so said the voice over the speakers, crackling a congratulations). One fellow, probably no more than thirteen or so with a shock of red hair was showing off his medal to a round-faced woman in her forties, wearing a blue staff uniform. He didn't seem to want to hand it to her, though, and kept possessive hold of the ribbon. "I'm not goin' tae tak it," she laughed, as he squirmed, a bit embarrassed. Then she smiled, admiring the medal. "Well done you. Congratulations." He stood a bit straighter, grinning mischievously again. "Did you ever win a medal then?"he enquired a little impudently, and she raised her eyebrows, amused. "When I was your age I did, aye," she told him, "for dancin'. Highlan' dancin.'" Laughing at his look of surprise, she turned and made her way back down the stairs. "Cheeky!" hissed an older teammate, but the redheaded fellow only grinned carelessly and shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers. 
• Bright sea, bright sky, lit by streaks of sun forcing its way through the clouds; dark, damp rock rising stubbornly from the waves, for hours. Even the islands gave out after a while, and still the boat kept on, out across the brilliant, wide sea. It felt like we were traveling to the ends of the earth, and when, more than three hours later we reached the isle of Lewis, it seemed as though we'd got there.
• Stornoway (or Steórnabhagh in Scottish Gaelic) with a population of about 9,000, is the 'Metropolis of the Western Isles,' apparently - meaning that there are five or six, instead of one, main streets, there is a Tesco and an old cannery, and there are cute touristy shops to be found, as well as at least five pubs; yet still, it is quite, quite small. More than the size, though, what made Stornoway feel so otherworldly, so incredibly distant from everywhere was a) the light (the sun was not fully set until 10 pm, and darkness fell still later, while sunrise was near to 3 am) and also b) the quiet. Silence lay like a comfortable blanket over the Hebrides, ruffled only by the undertones of sea and wind and the occasional gull, and even the rumble of passing cars did not seem to disturb the perpetual peaceful stillness for more than a moment. It is a beautiful place, with wooded hills to one side, clustered around an old castle, and brightly painted buildings lining the harbor. I want to come back to stay there longer - it is someplace I would want to live for a summer or two, when I become a fabulously successful writer and can do things like that... Hah. Our hostel was perfectly lovely, with heavy woodframe bunkbeds, a well stocked kitchen and dangerously comfortable couches in the living room. Our two roommates were extraordinary as well - so very much so, in fact, that they are receiving their own separate post (see part 1B). 
• With the exception of pubs, which seemed not to serve food that often, most restaurants seemed to close by about 9, which was unfortunately about when we began our hunt for dinner. Eventually we settled for Chinese take away, which was not nearly as sketchy as it could have been, and shockingly delicious. We sat and ate our egg rolls and hot-and-sour-pork by the water side, wondering how in the world the Cantonese immigrants running the restaurant had decided on the isle of Lewis when they were choosing a destination for their new life... and also pondering what on earth the Hebridean youth did with themselves in the evenings. We did not see any movie theaters, nor any real dance clubs, pubs seemed to mostly old-man pubs (not that that stopped us - we got whiskeys like proper old Scottish men, though minus the accents, alas) and we saw only one multi-purpose entertainment venue that might, we supposed, serve as the 'night-life' in Stornoway on the right evenings...  Still somewhat puzzled, we suddenly realized that the red car driving  - somewhat speedily - past had already gone by at least once. As had the blue pickup behind it. And the battered white car behind that. They honked and waved briefly at a little silver car and a heavy black SUV rushing past the other way, calling things out of opened windows, and within the next ten minutes they had all passed at least twice more, going in both directions. This, we decided, bemusedly, must be what the young hooligans of Lewis do at night - they drive. Hebridean Lowriders; word. We were amused. 
• The next day we ate breakfast in the hostel (toast and cereal and delicious jam) then headed out on our Hebridean tour – hopping on and off local busses all around northern Lewis. When we climbed onto the bus at the Stornoway station, the driver paused his conversation with the only other passenger long enough to wish us a good morning and give us our tickets, and once we had seated ourselves he continued chatting away animatedly. My goodness, I thought, I must be getting worse at deciphering the accents here – I can’t understand a word! It was then that I realized that what I was hearing was Scottish Gaelic, as were the voices on the BBC Alba Radio Nan Gaidheal crackling away as we pulled out of town and out into the moorlands. It is beautiful language - sing-song and melodic, full of soft sh-s and gh-s and all sorts of other sounds that lovely linguist Alice could categorize, but I can only admire. I was wishing desperately that I had continued my informal Gaelic lessons with my classmate, because even a simple 'good morning' and 'thank you' would have been nice... alas. As it was, I could only sit and smile as the peat bog rolled away in russet- and tan-swells on all sides, trading delighted glances with Carly, and reveling in the feeling of being somewhere foreign. Lewis had felt remote as soon as we arrived, but now it felt like a whole other world, and I loved it. 
• In the US, if something has been around for 100 years, we think it old and worth preserving. If it has been around two or three hundred years, it is typically enclosed in glass so that no one can mar its ancient surface by getting fingerprints on it, or by breathing too hard, and had we any prehistoric monuments, we would likely have them enveloped in plexiglass with a ten foot perimeter all round, or at least a set walkway like the one around Stonehenge... Therefore as American tourists, the experience of visiting the Callanish (Chalanais in Gaelic) standing stones was all the more incredible because there was none of the security that we would expect from a monument nearly 5000 years old. They are a little older than Stonehenge, and though they lack lintel stones the massive upright rocks are nearly as tall as those that stand on the Salisbury plains. What makes them truly incredible, however, is their utter isolation. There is no one around. A little winding path wends its way up from the car park, hidden by a grassy hill, and from the middle of the stones you can see, far away in the distance, a handful of small houses, but when Carly and I stood by the megalithic center stone, ringed by silent giants with the alignment stones stretching away in perfectly straight avenues to the west and east, we felt as though we were the last people on earth. The low stone fence was the only thing that prevented Lewis's many roving sheep from trotting all over the former burial ground; we trotted all over it instead, sitting in the shadow cast by the massive fifteen-foot center stone, and crouching low to the ground, trying to capture the silvery shapes of the monoliths against the pale sky. The rain and dew that coated the long grass had soaked through our shoes by the time we at cast our last awed glance at the circle and strode back down the hill to the little gift shop by the parking lot. After ringing up my post cards, the little old man working the till handed me a minute waxed paper bag that looked far smaller than the post-cards themselves, shook his head disconsolately, and told me, "If ye can get it in first try, you're hired." Somehow I did, and when I asked him quite seriously when I should start, he laughed a little, and offered me an apron. I truly wished I could have taken him up on that offer. 
• The bus that Carly and I took to the next stop on our Hebridean tour was even emptier than the previous one, and when the only other passenger, a little old lady, got off after a stop or two (on a stone bridge in the middle of now where, with nothing in sight but rolling hills and grass and peat and heather for miles... where was she going?!) we debated briefly whether we ought to feel unsafe with only ourselves and the terse grey-haired fellow who was currently taking the bus around the corners far too fast. Our concern escalated a little when we ended up pulled over on a side road, nothing visible but sheep and hills, and the driver got our and began to rummage around in the rear of the vehicle for what we were convinced was a murder weapon. No cell reception out that far, of course, and we laughed a little hysterically at how ridiculously easy it would be for a homicidal bus driver to off the silly American tourists and toss them in a boggy ditch with no one the wiser. Thankfully, our driver was no more a psychotic murderer than most bus drivers are, and we survived the trip intact. 
• The Carloway Blackhouse Village historical center is a collection of traditional island houses, made of dry stacked stone, thickly thatched and low, huddled around the rocky margin of a little bay. Although they were inhabited until the '70s, the design of such houses had not changed in centuries, and once again we had a disconcerting sense of timelessness as we walked past the low doorways and dangling rocks swaying gently on their strings (to hold the thatch down, apparently). Ducking inside one, we warmed our hands over a smoky peat fire, and were relishing the coziness of the small room after the damp chill of the out-of-doors when we heard a heavy thud-thud-thud, accompanied by a sounds similar to the noise four year olds make when gifted with a nice, bangable pot and a wooden spoon coming from the next room. We followed the noise, to find an old man with bright pink cheeks weaving smoky blue harris tweed on a loom the size of a tractor and twice as loud, and listened to him talking about the tradition of weaving on the islands and the colossal iron looms themselves ("After a while you get to know your machine, you get to respect it," he said. Nearly deafened by the racket made by the flying shuttle and slam of shifting warp strings, I believed him - I had a great deal of respect for the scary thing already). A documentary about collecting and drying peat was playing in another of the houses; the dvd player and projector seemed incongruous when mounted on a blacked, ancient beam as thick around as my waist, and the screen hung against the stone wall looked highly out of places. 
• We cooed over the adorable sheep, climbed a boggy little mountain, ruined our shoes, nearly lost my camera and phone (or I did, anyway – somehow it fell out of my purse as I was making record-breaking leaps over the aromatic muck) and were blown away when we reached the top – metaphorically by the amazing view of the cliffs and islands to the west, and almost literally by the stiff breeze. Nothing between us and the very northern tip of Newfoundland, we realized – we were only a degree or two south of Greenland, and level with Juneau, I later discovered, when I looked at the latitude on a map – and all I could think about, standing at the rocky tip of the world, was the endlessness of the grey sea crawling away forever from my feet. It was a heady feeling.  
• We might have made the 1:30 bus back to Stornoway if I hadn’t tossed my belongings out into the bog and subsequently had to retrieve them, but as it was we would have had to sprint for something like a mile through the ever increasing rain to even have a hope of making it. Instead, we happily made camp in the café, ordered tea and ate our tesco sandwiches on the sly, played cards, and made smalltalk with our waiter for what turned into almost an hour. Craig The Waiter was friendly, a former chef, new to Lewis (having lived in Harris, to the south,) and was expecting a baby, that day. When we asked aghast why on earth he was at work and not home with his wife who was due to go into labor at any moment, he shrugged a little and looked at us a bit oddly. “Bills have to be paid,” he said, as though the suggestion of leaving work was an extravagance in the extreme. He smiled a little, and tipped his hat farther back on his head as he cleared away the porcelain and napkins from one of the other tables, as outside the diminutive window beneath the thatch, the rain poured down.
• We went out again anyway after a while, and got thoroughly soaked walking down to the beach, by which point it almost didn’t matter how wet our feet got, since they clearly could not get any wetter. When we eventually caught the bus I am pretty sure I resembled nothing so much as a drowned rat, and an hour later, back in Stornoway, we were both still wet to the bone. A shower, a change of clothes, and spicy thai food helped chase the chill from our bones, and the evening turned beautiful as we left the restaurant and walked through the old Macleod castle grounds and gardens. The tumultuous sky was brilliantly illuminated by the descending sun, and the bright harbor buildings had the crisp, newly-washed look of a town after rain. We were sorry to think of leaving the next day.
• That morning, before we got on our bus, we went and saw some of the Lewis Chessmen – a set of carved Viking chess pieces from the 12^th century that were discovered on Lewis in the 19^th century. The age of them alone would make them fascinating, not to mention the romance of the Game of Kings, but what was really striking about them were the faces – each individual, and few showing the noble bravery of soldiers about to engage in battle: the King looks wide-eyed and peeved, the Queen world-weary and resigned (you can almost hear her saying, Men and their wars, at it again…), and one of the knights is shown biting his shield in suspense or fear. I was charmed. We spent quite a while examining the pieces, and wandering around the funny little museum which was a single room in the second story of what might once have been a schoolhouse. Seeing other pieces in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh when we returned, and later some in the British Museum, was a bit like greeting old friends.
• We hauled our bags onto the bus, and bid a reluctant farewell to Stornoway and Lewis, heading south toward  the Tarbert ferry and the isle of Skye.