Riddoch on the Outer Hebrides

By Lesley Riddoch

Riddoch on the Outer Hebrides is a thought-provoking commentary based on broadcaster Lesley Riddoch's cycle journey through a beautiful island chain facing seismic cultural and economic change. Her experience is described in a typically affectionate but hard-hitting style; with humour, anecdote and a growing sympathy for islanders tired of living at the margins but fearful of closer contact with mainland Scotland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luath Press
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781804250372

Lesley Riddoch

Lesley set up the policy group Nordic Horizons in 2010 with Dan Wynn and is one of Scotland’s best known commentators and broadcasters. She was assistant editor of The Scotsman in the 1990s (and editor of The Scotswoman in 1995 when female staff wrote, edited and produced the paper) and contributing editor of the Sunday Herald. She is best known for broadcasting with programmes on bbc2, Channel 4, Radio 4 and bbc Radio Scotland, for which she has won two Sony speech broadcaster awards. Lesley runs her own independent radio and podcast company, Feisty Ltd which produces a popular weekly podcast and was a member of the three-year eu-funded Equimar marine energy project. Lesley is a weekly columnist for The Scotsman and The National and a regular contributor to The Guardian, Scotland Tonight, Question Time and Any Questions. She is also completing a phd supervised by Oslo and Strathclyde Universities comparing the Scots and Norwegian hutting traditions. Lesley founded the charity Africawoman and the feminist magazine Harpies and Quines and was a member of the Isle of Eigg Trust, which led to the successful community buyout in 1997. She wrote Riddoch on the Outer Hebrides in 2007, Blossom – what Scotland needs to Flourish with Luath in 2013 and Wee White Blossom – what post referendum Scotland needs to Flourish in December 2014.

Book preview

Barra to Vatersay the Southern Isles

Depopulation, missing women and beach landings

Beach-fringed Barra is a mainlander’s idea of island heaven. But with a population of just over 1,300, it’s teetering on the brink of viability. Dear knows why. An almost Irish mix of pubs and hotels with busy seafood restaurants greets the visitor at Castlebay. And yet female inhabitants have been quietly leaving Barra for years. Perhaps, as the proverb suggests, island women have found it easier to live with lobsters than island men – fabulous sailors who spend more time at sea than the average crustacean.

Perhaps the problem is far simpler. The neighbouring island of Vatersay was nicknamed ‘Bachelor Island’ until the 1990s, when a new causeway let island women leave without having to lift a heavy outboard motor or wheedle a two-hour boat journey from an under-occupied passing man.

Despite the belated arrival of this ‘mod con’ – the birth-rate on the Southern Isles is still low. Consequently, there’s been mainland pressure to scrap the subsidised air service to the famous Cockle Strand, and no plans to improve the five-hour ferry service that arrives from Oban every other day in winter.

Things are tough for Barra. But I suspect tough is what finally gets Barra going.

The hot June day I arrived in 2006, the tar on the road was melting. A stream of cars and lorries rolled through the jaws of the ferry onto the pier at Castlebay – probably the best natural harbour in the whole island chain. Caught between the arriving and departing queues of ferry traffic, I leaned on a wall with my bike and overladen panniers, making patterns in the sticky tar with the chequered tread of my trainers. Maybe mainland roads are made of more substantial stuff these days, but I could almost hear my mother telling me to stop making a mess.

Banks of waving yellow flags (irises) flanked the foreshore and white sand glistened beneath every slowly draining, breaking wave. Gulls swooped and a large, animated red-haired family passed – lively with the business of reunion and arrival.

One child, momentarily missed in the swirl, glanced up with those unusual, dark eyes ascribed by Canadian writer Alastair MacLeod to the Clann Chaluim Ruaidh – a family group physically dispersed across the world but still genetically united in appearance.

Two old men were squinting into the sun by the harbour wall, watching the Captain hang his jacket over the ship’s railing and a deck-hand deftly coil the ferry’s thick ropes; all watched, in turn, by visitors stretched out on the lawns of harbour hotels, their eyes fixed on the towering ferry, like Lilliputians regarding an ocean-going Gulliver.

How on earth could such a beautiful and casually eventful place be struggling to keep its people? Of course, summer is deceptive. Islanders trying to attract ‘new blood’ habitually make incomers stay a winter before making a decision to settle permanently. Even so, it’s astonishing how one long, lazy summer day can put the grim reality of rain, isolation, claustrophobia and cancelled winter ferries completely out of mind. I heaved up the hill to check in at the Castlebay Hotel. Minus the weight of panniers and recording equipment, I zipped back down fast, and freewheeled to the only bicycle shop on the island. Calum was a great find.

‘If you went out of here and turned left you’d hit a terrible hill. Then you’d lose heart, come back here and return the bike. So we send people the other way. On the west side it’s flat, beautiful beaches, Vatersay if you are energetic: sheep, buttercups, that kind of thing. And of course you have to cycle past three hotels with pubs and food. Everyone comes back at 5pm tired but happy.’

‘But you still have to tackle the hill if you cycle round the island.’

‘You do still have to tackle that hill, but at the end of the day it’s not nearly as big.’

‘You find that?’

‘I’ve never been on a bike in my life. Neither has that good for nothing old man who runs this shop, John