Our 2015 tour was organised after a winter and spring in which our cycling had been seriously curtailed by pressure of work. Accordingly (a) we desperately needed a break, and (b) I needed to be quite conservative about projected daily mileage.
I thought carefully about the trip in which I wanted to visit Barra, Benbecula, the Uists, Skye, and Mull, and I deliberately included two double night stays (on Barra and North Uist), so we could choose routes to suit how we were going. Where possible, I wanted to have some nice seafood in the evenings. All our accommodation was pre-booked. I had trouble finding B&Bs on Barra, where we ended up in the very excellent Isle of Barra Beach Hotel and in Tobermory – we ended up staying in Salen while on Mull. Once again, we had less than ideal weather. While I wouldn't say it was particularly wet, it was rather cold - colder than our recent experience of late spring-early summer touring in the Hebrides.
We rode our now not-so-new Thorn Raven Discovery tandem (see my multipart review – Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4;Part 5). We didn’t have a single mechanical problem, though we did see minor oil leakage from the Rohloff hub while transporting it in the car.
Day 1 Oban to Barra
We arrived at Oban around lunchtime, having spent a few days visiting our families en route. We easily found Hazelbank Motors, where we had arranged to leave the car during our trip. I think the lady at the desk remembers us from previous tours. The drive had been good overall, though we had some vile weather on the drive from Edinburgh to Oban. After unloading and reassembling the tandem, we attached the panniers and left the car to ride down to the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry terminal. As usual, we were there rather too early, and the ferry wasn’t due to leave until 15:40!
We bought Hopscotch tickets for the Oban-Castlebay, Barra-Eriskay and Lochmaddy-Uig crossings (Hopscotch 20, £26 per person with the bike travelling free). We spent the remaining time eating excellent smoked salmon sandwiches from the nearby seafood stall and talking to fellow cyclists. Two of them were riding bikes with Rohloff hubs. We also saw a friend from work and her partner, who were travelling in a sports car.
We found the ferry was a bit smaller than we’d been on before. It was really a bit cold to entice us out on the open decks, so we contented ourselves with looking out of the windows during the five and a half hour trip up the Sound of Mull and across the Minch to Castlebay. We saw quite a few porpoises, and a variety of seabirds. We wandered over to the cafeteria for fish and chips, and I had a couple of bottles of beer.
Arriving at Castlebay, cyclists were last off the ferry. It was a lovely clear evening, but quite cool. The sun was of course low as we rode over the two miles or so to the Isle of Barra Beach Hotel, where I’d booked a double room for a couple of nights. As it turned out the coach party on the ferry were booked into the same hotel, and we’d been upgraded to upper sea facing room - this was good, as we had excellent views of waves on beach. Despite arriving after the coach, we managed to check in before the coach party had got all their luggage sorted out. We were also advised to have breakfast early the following morning before the coach party!
We popped out for a brief walk on beach then back to our room. We were pretty impressed by the hotel, which seems well appointed - it’s been done out in a neat nautical style in its recent refurbishment.
The beach by the hotel, Barra[/caption]
Day 2 - Barra
As advised, we had breakfast at 7.30am - and an excellent fry-up! The coach party appeared at about 8am, and seemed very jolly. Some asked if we were the tandemists they’d seen the previous evening. We’d made no real plans for the day’s cycling (and indeed I’d expected a relatively low mileage for the first day), so we plumped for a ride down to Vatersay to start with. We packed some food and the Trangia into the saddlebag, hoping to have a picnic lunch later on. After a few false starts (due to forgetting things such as the toolkit), we finally set off.
It was quite sunny, but also rather windy and quite cold. In fact it was sufficiently cool that we both used quite a bit of clothing. Over the years, I’ve tended towards using my regular racing clothing, and this year was no exception: I was pretty much Castelli’d up, with my new Gabba jacket, thermal bib tights and full-fingered gloves. The Gabba turned out to be an excellent choice, it’s wind-proof and breathable, and can shrug off light rain. For those more persistent rain showers later in the tour, I switched to my Goretex jacket. We could see chunks of weather heaving up towards the island, but during the day we didn’t have any prolonged rain, just a couple of showers.
We started by riding back towards Castlebay, then turning down the Nask road towards Vatersay. En route, we saw the wreckage of the wartime Catalina seaplane that we’d seen on a previous trip. There’s a bit of a steep climb before descending to the Vatersay causeway. This causeway was only completed in 1991. It’s quite short and is supposed to have been built following the drowning not of people but of a prize bull named Bernie being moved to Barra by swimming.
Once on Vatersay, the main sight is the astonishing beaches (there is a broch, but not so obvious to find). On the east facing side of a spit of sand dunes is a gloriously sandy beach with calm and very blue water. When we clambered up on the dunes to look west, we were buffeted by Atlantic winds! The west facing beach is much pebblier, with waves coming in fast.
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The east-facing beach at Vatersay[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3476" align="alignnone" width="1000"]
The west-facing beach at Vatersay[/caption]
Day 3- Barra to Lochboisdale
Looking out of the window first thing in the morning was pretty dispiriting: wind bringing a lashing of rain! However, things had improved dramatically by the time we left the hotel after another excellent breakfast. We left before the coach, but we expected to be on the same ferry to Eriskay. I’d asked some of them where their next destination was, and they were a bit vague about it. Later, as we waited for the Eriskay ferry, I spoke to their tour guide and it seems that hotels big enough to accommodate a coach party are few and far between. They were headed for two nights in Stornoway, with a day touring round some of the attractions. Anyway, we rode round clockwise and turned north towards Ardmor and the airport. We rode a little beyond the Ardmor turnoff and paused to enjoy the view of the cockle strand, with the tide in.
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Barra airport with the tide in[/caption]
Then we backtracked to take the turn for the ferry at Ardmor. When we reached the ferry terminal, we could see the coach, and we ended up chatting to the coach party quite a bit. The organiser had chosen a smaller coach than usual, so it could fit the smaller ferries. As it was, the coach grounded itself front and rear when getting on and off the Eriskay ferry, which caused some consternation. I expect the same would have happened on the Berneray-Leverburgh ferry.
The crossing was smooth and enlivened by the sight of gannets diving around us. After the coach negotiated its exit from the ferry, we paused at the small terminal building before climbing the road out of the harbour. This road climbs quite high, and offered lovely views across to Barra and beyond.
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Looking back to the Eriskay ferry from the hill[/caption]
There’s a nice descent to the village and on to the causeway. We’d planned to take an “on spec” route to Lochboisdale via detours to the machair to have a picnic and admire the beach. We sat at a picnic table eating our lunch and feeling a bit cold.
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Another photo of a windswept tandemist enjoying a picnic lunch, this time on the South Uist machair[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3489" align="alignnone" width="1000"]
The beach near our lunch spot[/caption]
It wasn’t yet raining, but the temperature was really a bit pathetic for late May. We found ourselves on cycle route 780, and pretty soon saw a sign for the Cladh Hallan roundhouses. This sounded quite interesting, so we turned down a road that gradually declined in quality, ending up as a dirt track by a large cemetery. No further signs for the roundhouses could be seen! At this point, a rain shower started and we decided not to pursue this any further. As it turns out, these roundhouses are pretty low-lying remnants for more information, see this website and this Wikipedia page. Apparently a couple of mummified bodies were found - the Wikipedia entry says “According to recent anthropological and DNA-analysis the skeletons of a female and a male were compiled from body parts of at least 6 different human individuals” and that the mummies had been placed in peat bogs for the presumed purpose of preservation before being interred. If we’d have found them we’d have seen this:
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The Cladh Hallan roundhouses - by Anne Burgess. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]
We rode on towards Lochboisdale. Lochboisdale’s really not too exciting, as it’s a pretty loose collection of houses and buildings. It has of course got the Lochboisdale Hotel, and now a large marina development. We spied the very pink community cafe as we approached, and seeing as it was really a bit early to go to the B&B, we popped in for tea and cakes (which were excellent). We spoke to some other customers as we were leaving, who alerted us to a guy with a caravan and a big telescope trained on some nesting Golden Eagles up on North Uist. We mentally bookmarked this for investigation in a couple of days.
The we had a quick detour to the new harbour, which in part is being set up as a yachting marina and in part as a commercial site for seafood processing, we rode back to Brae Lea House, our B&B for the night. This is a B&B we’d used in 2014, it’s very comfortable with an excellent breakfast.
After unloading the bike and getting cleaned up, we wandered down to the Lochboisdale Hotel for a pint of McEwans 80/- and a plate of haddock and chips. After that, we walked out along the new harbour before returning to the B&B. From the new harbour, Lochboisdale looks quite pretty. Perhaps a thriving marina will bring some changes to the town!
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Lochboisdale from the new harbour and marina[/caption]
Back to to Day 2 - Barra
On to Day 4 - Lochboisdale to Lochmaddy