Last month, I had the chance to return to a few places on Lewis I'd not been to for nearly 30 years. It was back in 1998 that I made the Tolsta to Ness walk on what is now called a "Heritage Trail", a 17 km (10-mile) walk described in Chapter 7.2 of Thirty Years of Adventures in Search of the Past: The Outer Hebrides.
Taking advantage of some spectacular July weather, I drove up to Ness and took the side road to Skigersta. At the end of the paved road, I found a small parking area next to a Heritage Trail marker at NB 5431 5129. There was room for three cars, but it was empty. It seemed no one else was interested in walking this brilliant stretch of coastline on a perfect July day, which was fine by me.
Two miles into the walk, I came to Cuidhsiadar, a group of shielings still in use, clustered along An Abhainn Dubh, the Black River. The river is spanned by a cement bridge, which I remembered crossing back in 1998. For someone walking north, which I was back then, it marked the end of the boggy parts of the walk. For me, heading south this time, it marked the beginning of dealing with soupy, squishy, and tiring terrain. The next photo is looking back north across the bridge to Cuidhsiadar.
After crossing the river, the track became fainter with every step as it climbed to the south. If I kept straight, the track would take me to Filiscleitir, another village of shielings still in use. However, I noticed a series of waymarker posts for the Heritage Path, markers that had not been there in the last century, which led off to the east. And so I followed them to the clifftops.
A boggy series of ups and downs had to be crossed, including two treacherous swamps that required a lot of zig-zagging to conquer. The gaiters saved the day, as at one point I sank to my knees in slimy muck. But it was worth the effort when I reached the cliff edge and Dune Tower came into view.
In his book Island Memories, John Wilson Dougal writes about a nighttime arrival at Dune Tower. It was a much different experience than my approach on a sunny summer day:
Approaching in the darkness with great care, since the sound of dashing waters was heard on the cliff edge, a pathway was reached which, when seen next morning, revealed itself as the edge of a chasm, one side dropping two hundred feet to the sea. Inside the house blazed a cheerful peat-fire, on which a store of scones and cakes had been prepared by the kind folks who had arrived earlier. About midnight they bravely went off to their village, four miles away, lighting their path with a lantern, leaving me alone in the haunted house. This is a haven completely furnished, even to the cragman's rope lying in a corner of the kitchen.
It had been quite an undertaking to build the house. Between 1907 and 1920, Iain MacNeachail (John Nicolson), a former Baptist preacher in America, had a house and a nearby chapel built. Nicolson dreamed for years of having a home and chapel near where his father had a shieling. Nine tons of sand were brought in by boat and carried up the 200-foot cliffs. And several tons of cement, along with all necessary lumber and fixtures, were carted across the moors from Ness, six miles away.
In front of the house, almost completely covered in tall grass, were two low stones planted firmly in the turf. In his book The Haunted Isles, Alasdair Alpin MacGregor tells that they mark the grave of a man who fell to his death while birding on the nearby cliff, long before the house was built. By the time they retrieved the body, it was too decomposed to transport it to Suainebost Cemetery, so he was laid to rest here, near the top of the cliff where he died. In the next photo, you can just see the two stones in the foreground.
The house was much more dilapidated than when I was last here. The following two photos show how more of the north gable has fallen (the first photo was taken in 1998).
Five minutes later, Nicolson's chapel came into view. It looked just as it had in 1998, all four walls stood complete, and two lancet windows graced its western gable. Nicolson built the chapel for the people who inhabited the Filiscleitir shielings in the summer. It must have been a serene place to worship, as it overlooks the small bay where the Leum Langa River tumbles to the rough waters of the Minch. Here are a few photos of the chapel. The first dates to 1998.
It was getting late in the afternoon, so it was time to start back. Knowing where the worst stretches of bog were, I did not follow the markers, but kept a bit higher on the hillside. Once back through Cuidhsiadar, I followed a side track that cleaved through the peat fields east of the main track (NB 5468 6019).
The peat road turned into a grassy quad-bike track, and I was able to easily make it halfway to the coast. Where the track petered out, I could see my destination a half mile away: a white obelisk rising from the edge of the cliffs.
The ten-foot obelisk sits atop a two-tiered pedestal. It has a metal plaque embedded high up on one side. The plaque has an engraving of a rock-hammer, along with the name John Wilson Dougal and the date 1905.
It was in 1905 that JW Dougal noted the flinty-crush bands of the Outer Hebrides. He was the founder of a chemical company in Edinburgh and an amateur geologist in his spare time. For many years, he explored the geology of the Outer Hebrides and was the first to describe their flinty-crush rock formations. You're asking what flinty-crush is, aren't you? Here is one definition I found: 'It is an ultracrushed variety of mylonite, in which the primary structures and porphyroclasts are obliterated so that the rock becomes homogeneous and dense with little parallel structure.' In layman's terms: it's very hard rock.
Dougal, who died in 1935, believed that a band of this rigid material, stretching the length of the Western Isles, helped them survive the effects of glacial erosion. He wrote up many of his adventures in the Hebrides, and after he died in 1935, they were published in the book Island Memories.
I was tired of crossing bogs, so instead of returning to the track as I'd done in 1998, I decided to follow the spectacular coastline to the north. And so I followed the cliffs, aiming for Skigersta jetty, a mile away. It was the right choice, as it took me past Cladach Cuidhsiadar, a stunning white sand beach at the mouth of the Cuidhsiadar River.
A half hour later, the village of Skigersta came in sight, and after rounding the ravine carved by the Skigersta River, I came to the tarmac road that leads to the jetty.
I reached the car six hours after setting out. Next to the small parking area, hidden in tall grass and long ignored, was an old information board about the Tolsta to Ness path. I pulled out some of the grass to uncover it, as I wish I'd seen it at the beginning of the walk. If you ever have the chance to walk the route, even if only part of it, do it. It is spectacular.
