Where to Stay in the Outer Hebrides
Map of Where to Stay in the Outer Hebrides
Information about the Outer Hebrides
The Outer Hebrides is one of the most remote and extraordinary destinations in the British Isles, a chain of islands stretching for over a hundred miles along the Atlantic edge of Scotland from the Butt of Lewis in the north to Barra Head in the south. Known in Gaelic as the Long Island, this is a landscape of ancient rock, white sand beaches, vast open skies and a living Gaelic culture that gives the islands a depth and distinctiveness found nowhere else in Scotland.
Lewis and Harris, the largest and most northerly of the islands, are in fact a single island of two very different characters joined at a narrow waist of moorland. Lewis, in the north, is a vast flat peatland of lochs and sky, its communities strung along the coast in a landscape that feels ancient and elemental. Harris, to the south, is dramatically different — a landscape of rocky mountains dropping to some of the most breathtaking beaches in Europe, the white shell sand and turquoise waters of Luskentyre and Scarista rivalling anything the Caribbean can offer yet set against a backdrop of Atlantic sky and Hebridean light that is entirely and unmistakably their own.
The Callanish Standing Stones on Lewis, erected over four thousand years ago in a cruciform arrangement of extraordinary precision and beauty, are among the most significant and atmospheric prehistoric monuments in the British Isles, rivalling Stonehenge in their impact yet visited by a fraction of the crowds.
The southern islands — North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Barra — each have their own distinct character and charm. The machair, a unique coastal grassland of wildflowers that blooms in extraordinary abundance each summer along the Atlantic shore, is one of the most beautiful and ecologically rare habitats in Europe. Barra, the most southerly of the inhabited islands, has an intimacy and beauty that wins the heart of almost every visitor, its castle rising from the tidal waters of Castlebay in one of the most iconic images in all of Scotland.
Whether you are looking for a journey to the very edge of the British Isles, a beach of breathtaking beauty with no one else on it, a living encounter with Gaelic language and culture or simply the profound restorative pleasure of a landscape unchanged for millennia, the Outer Hebrides is a destination unlike any other.
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