Hebrides

by Peter May, David Wilson

Genres: International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

THE PERFECT COMPANION TO PETER MAY'S LEWIS TRILOGY, AND A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY THROUGH THE HEBRIDEAN ISLANDS. The landscape of the Outer Hebrides, with its stark cliffs, ghostly mists and lonely beaches, has become a definitive character of Peter May's Lewis trilogy. In Hebrides, readers will accompany him on an odyssey in prose and images, through a history of the Vikings' 'Long Island' and his own deep personal connection with the islands that influenced his bestselling work. Travelling as if alongside his protagonist Fin Macleod, he describes the island life - as bewitching as it is treacherous - his encounter with the bird-hunters of Sula Sgeir, the savage seas of Ness and the churches of Eriskay. With extracts from the trilogy and specially commissioned photographs, this book places his writing and characters within the land that gave them form. Couldn't get enough of the Lewis trilogy and its extraordinary setting? Check out Peter May's latest bestseller, Coffin Road, in which the million-selling master of crime brings murder back to the Outer Hebrides.

Release date: November 17, 2015

Publisher: Quercus

Print pages: 240

Sample

The Outer Hebrides is a 124-mile- (200 km-) long archipelago off the northwest coast of Scotland. It stretches from Lewis in the north to Berneray in the south, and includes outlying islands such as St. Kilda and the Shiant Isles. The islands vary from the peat-covered uplands of Lewis and the mountains of South Harris, to the wonderful sandy beaches of Barra and the Uists and the breathtaking cliffs of St. Kilda. The spine of the islands was formed by ancient gneisses while the Shiant Isles and St. Kilda are quite young in geological terms, and were created when the Atlantic opened up around 55 million years ago. Since then the Outer Hebrides have been shaped by sea, ice, wind, and rain, to present the starkly beautiful islands we see today.



The Shiants

The Shiant Isles as seen from Lemreway on the east coast of Lewis. They are a comparatively recent geological creation. Beyond them we see the Isle of Skye.



Uig strata

The different rock strata and colors can be seen very clearly here in these outcrops of rock at Uig, southwest Lewis.



Rocks at Dalbeg

The beach at Dalbeg on the west coast of Lewis is littered with giant pebbles that chart the passage of millions of years.



South Uist dawn

Early morning on South Uist could be mistaken for the dawn of time.



The mainland from beyond Tong

The distant snow-covered peaks. of the mainland seen from near Tong, north of Stornoway. Only the houses on the left show the presence of human beings in this timeless landscape.



The mainland from Bayble

This picture has an almost prehistoric feel to it. These are the mountains of the mainland as seen across the Minch from Bayble on the Eye Peninsula.

The geological history of the Outer Hebrides can be read in the rocks and sediments that make up the islands. Their history dates from the Precambrian period more than 525 million years ago, when the Lewisian gneisses were formed, to the Quaternary period, which began around 2.6 million years ago, extending through the last ice age 11,500 years ago to the present day. In between there were major geological upheavals on Earth that changed and formed and shaped the islands. At one point they comprised part of a major landmass, before continents clashed and blocks of the Earth’s crust moved against each other along the Outer Hebrides fault, throwing up the Caledonian mountains.

Hard to believe, but what later became Scotland once lay close to the equator. Tropical forests grew in low-lying areas, forming the deposits of coal that were later mined in the central belt. As the continents moved, so Scotland drifted north. Its hot, dry climate produced sands and pebbles later forming rocks that can be found near Stornoway today.

At the time of what was known as the Laxfordian Event, 1,700 million years ago, molten rock was forced into the gneisses of South Harris and western Lewis, forming sheets and veins of hard pink granite. And since the granite was less easily eroded than the surrounding gneiss, these developed into the spectacular sea stacks that can now be seen off the coast of Uig.



Sea stacks, Uig

These rock stacks at Uig demonstrate the different rates at which rocks are eroded.

During the Jurassic period floodwaters filled the basin that now forms the Minch—the body of water between the islands and the mainland. It became a shallow sea supporting life of all kinds, and dinosaurs roamed its coasts. Between 23 and 65 million years ago erupting volcanoes along the west coast of Scotland forced molten rock into the layers of sediment in the surrounding seas and formed the magma chambers now exposed as St. Kilda.

But the landscape of the islands as we know them today was really shaped by the cycles of freeze and thaw that occurred during the ice ages of the Quaternary period, when glaciers scoured and sculpted the mountains, valleys, and plains that characterize the Hebrides. Seas rose rapidly during the sudden warming that accompanied the end of the last ice age, producing something that approximates the present-day coastline.



St. Kilda

The islands of St. Kilda shimmer on the horizon.



Horgabost, midnight

The bay at Horgabost on the Isle of Harris on a summer’s midnight. We could be forgiven for thinking that this is how the world might have looked at the time of creation.



Rocks at Uig

Silver sands and rock strata present a natural time map of the islands here at Uig in southwest Lewis.

Stones and boulders deposited on the sea floor by melting glaciers were ground and polished over millennia by the ebb and flow of the sea itself, and washed ashore by storms as beach shingle along many shorelines. Although the creamy gold and silver beaches that distinguish the islands were also partly formed by glacial deposits, they are for the most part made up of the tiny crushed shell fragments and skeletal remains of marine creatures and algae.

The coastal grasslands behind those beaches along the western seaboard of the Western Isles are known as machair, and are particularly rare in Europe. Largely composed of compacted shell fragments, their well-drained, lime-rich soil provides fertile ground for farming.

Again, it may be hard to believe, but the islands were then covered by forests, and it was not until humans began to cut down the trees and the land was taken over by peat, which started forming around 6,000 years ago, that the barren, treeless appearance of the archipelago as it can be seen today finally developed.



Mackerel stream

Wonderful golden and silver beaches characterize the western coastline of the islands in particular. Here a stream leaves “mackerel” tracks in the sand.



Machair land

Spring flowers and fresh grasses bring life to the coastal machair.



Callanish stones

These stones, hacked out of raw gneiss, present one of the great mysteries of the islands at Callanish on the west coast of Lewis. Raised there, even before Stonehenge, no one has yet been able to explain why. There are several other, smaller, stone circles in the vicinity.

Most of the gneisses that make up the islands were formed by cooling magma around 3,000 million years ago, and are among some of the oldest rocks on earth. Huge pressures exerted by subsequent upheavals on the planet, compressed and metamorphosed the gneisses and various sedimentary rocks creating the banded Lewisian gneiss found all over the islands today.

Gneiss is an extremely hard rock, difficult to break or fashion, and yet it has been worked and shaped by Hebrideans for millennia. The most spectacular example can be found in the standing stones at Callanish. This circle of thirteen stones, surrounding a central monolith 32 feet (10 meters) high, all cut from slabs of local gneiss, has avenues that lead off north, south, east, and west, and if viewed from above, bears a remarkable resemblance to a Celtic cross. The Callanish stones, however, were erected about 4,000 years ago, long before the birth of Christ. Why they were put there, no one knows.

Undaunted by the hardness of the rock, the islands’ inhabitants split them along their banding to create the building blocks used to construct drystone Iron Age “brochs,” including the famous Dun Carloway. . .