of sands. Inland, sombre colours are paramount and the lochans do not reflect the colour of the sky from their dark depths as does the sea above its floor of white sand. But the Hebrides are not all a dark plateau. The southern end of Lewis (Plate VII) and most of Harris are hilly. The Forest of Harris gives us rough going as anywhere in the Highlands and the Clisham rises to a fine peak of 2,622 feet. The red deer which live in these fastnesses are small, but have very well-shaped heads. The pine marten was also to be found there until recently. Its very wildness is the best protection this piece of country has. The lower deer forests of Park and Morsgail are fairly heavily poached of their deer, in an island of such heavy human population.
The Hebridean burns a lot of peat. His peat stacks are far larger than those of the mainland. By cutting peats he is doing two jobs—providing the wherewithal for comfort at the fire, and removing some of the great pervading blanket. He does not come upon bed rock at the foot of the peat banks but on to a layer of boulder clay which, when mixed with the top thin layer of sedge and peat, will shortly turn into fairly good soil providing much better grazing than anything from the top of the peat. The boulder clay came there by glacial action before the peat was laid down. Our Lewisman makes new ground this way and there is no doubt that if the modern mechanical tools such as the scraper and bulldozer were brought into operation on what is commonly called the skinned land, the agricultural scientist could make much good land in Lewis without attempting to conquer the upper layer of the peat.
As might be expected, the bird life of the interior of the Outer Hebrides is poor in variety and scanty, the nesting grey lag geese and red-necked phalarope (Plate XXXIIa) being probably the most interesting members. The geese feed on the crofting ground and on the machair but return into the maze of the interior to nest. The coasts are rich in sea birds, ducks and waders.
The Outer Hebrides are often described as being treeless, but the term is relative. The people who write about them are usually those who have a considerable experience of trees and tend to take them for granted. The Outer Hebrides are neither treeless, nor need they continue to be so desperately short of trees as they are. The grounds of Stornoway Castle on the east side of Lewis are famous. There are hundreds of acres of trees here, mostly conifers, but with a fair sprinkling of hardwoods and deciduous trees. These are Lady Mathieson’s legacy to the Hebrides. Indeed, it needed courage to start tree-planting from scratch. She planted another piece with larch and other conifers half-way across Lewis, near Achmore, and these made good trees, but were blown down by a terrific gale on March 16, 1921. There are 90-year-old Corsican pines of hers at the head of Little Loch Roag, growing quite straight to 35 feet high. There is another plantation of deciduous and coniferous trees at Grimersta on the Atlantic coast of Lewis. Another plantation of conifers sheltering a house, Scalisgro, on the east side of Little Loch Roag, is less than twenty-five years old, and twelve years ago several acres of conifers were planted in Glen Valtos in the Uig district of Lewis. Sycamores are the great standby of a tree lover on an ocean coast. Several good ones are to be seen at Tarbert, Harris. And at Borve on the west side of Harris there are several acres of stunted mountain pines. More trees are to be found about Ben More Lodge in South Uist, and there are a few more in the north glen of Barra. Heslop Harrison has recently drawn attention to the birch wood, complete with bluebells and wood sorrel, on the slopes of the Allt Vollagair, South Uist. As has been mentioned already, many of the islands in the Lewis lochs are covered with dwarf rowans. That the Outer Hebrides were once a wooded area may be deduced on archaeological grounds as well as on the living relics. Baden-Powell and Elton (1936–37) excavated an Iron-Age midden at Galson on the north-west coast of Lewis. They found bones of wild cat and blackbird among the refuse, both creatures of woodland and savannah. The age of the midden was reckoned at 1,500 years or thereabouts.
What is most heartening in the woodland situation in the Outer Isles is that the crofters themselves are taking an interest in trees for shelter, and in many a garden you will see a host of willow cuttings bravely shooting forth in summer and making some certain headway against the gales and spray from the Atlantic. Rhododendrons are growing quite well in many places and are at least providing the first cover for something else to grow within their shelter.
The sands and the machairs of the Hebrides are often referred to in this book: in the Sound of Harris there are several islands which seem little else but shell sand, such as Ensay and Berneray; and there is Vallay of North Uist. But I would not wish to neglect the cliffs which are also important in the natural history of the Outer Isles. The great ocean pounds against them and must be gradually wearing them away, but the rock is the old gneiss and holds remarkably well. Sir Archibald Geikie in his Scenery of Scotland calls to mind the measurement of the pounding effect of waves which was made at the Atlantic rock of Skerryvore before the lighthouse was begun in 1845. The summer average weight of pounding was 611 lbs. per square foot; in the winter months it was 2,086 lbs. per square foot, and in the very heavy south-westerly gale of March 29, 1845, a pressure of 6,083 lbs. per square foot was registered. Even when it is water alone that strikes the rock, the wearing effect is far from negligible, but when other loose rock is moved by the water and pounded against the cliff, even our short lifetimes may be able to notice the denuding effect of wave action. I remember an incident on North Rona which certainly opened my eyes to what a big sea could do. It was in December, 1938, in a period of south-westerly gales which would veer to west and north-west and begin again from south-west before the wind had fallen. They were worst in the nights and I would go out in the mornings to see the magnificence of sea against the low cliffs of the northern peninsula. These cliffs were perhaps forty feet high, but sheer, and going into deep water. The top was irregular with occasional ten-foot gullies a few yards wide in which were some very big boulders eight to ten feet thick, and a lot more of a size just too heavy for a man to lift. When there one morning, a sudden shower caused me to take shelter under one of the big pieces of rock. Peppered scars were visible all over the big boulder above and on the smaller ones lying on the smooth floor of the gully. It was evident that the sea had come green into here and rolled the smaller boulders up and down. But observation was not critical enough to question how these smaller boulders could pepper the big one several feet above. When sheltering there again after another tremendous night, it was obvious that the big boulder was not in the same place as it was the day before. Those pepperings had been caused by its own rollings to and fro in the gully under the impulse of the sea which had filled the gully thirty to forty feet above its normal level. That boulder, probably, had done much to wear the gully itself in the course of thousands of years.
Some of the cliffs of the Hebridean coasts are impressive and become the crowded haunts of ledge-breeding sea birds. The precipice of Aonaig in Mingulay is 793 feet. The stacks of Arnamull and Lianamull in Mingulay are also very fine. Harvie-Brown thought Lianamull the closest-packed guillemot station he had ever seen. Barra Head or Bernera, the most southerly island of the Hebrides, has some fine cliffs and in front of the lighthouse on the southern face is a gully which takes a terrific updraught of spray in southerly gales and makes the dwelling of the lighthouse suffer a heavy rain of salt water, a rain of sudden torrential showers of a moment’s duration.
The influence of the sea in times of storm has already been mentioned as a land-making one on the western side of the Hebrides where it throws up sand for biological agencies to work upon. The islands in the Sound of Harris probably change shape through the years, sand being laid down in one place and taken away in another. Pabbay, for example, was the granary of Harris but the sand has encroached over the south-east end and has gone at the west. West again of Vallay, a sandy island of North Uist, the remains of a forest of trees may be discerned at low spring tides. This submerged forest is probably the result of Holocene sinkings, but nevertheless the shell-sand beaches have certainly advanced within historical times. The minister in Harris who was responsible for the account of that parish in the Old Statistical Account of 1794 remarks that certain lands had been lost to the plough within living memory, and that when a sand hill became breached by some agency and was eventually worn away, good loam was sometimes found beneath and even the ruins of houses and churches. Whatever we may have lost in the Holocene sinkings, it may be remarked that the last three thousand years have seen more rising than sinking along Highland coasts.
The
