Between the Uists

Words by MARK ROWE

The tiny island of Benbecula was once home to the MacDonalds of Clanranald and played a crucial role in the escape of Scotland’s most famous prince…

Benbecula is one of the smaller vertebrae that comprise the spine of the Outer Hebrides’ island chain.

Just eight miles long and eight miles broad in the beam, nature has neatly slotted it, in a pleasingly jigsaw-like way, between North and South Uist. Many visitors traverse this pebble in the Atlantic by car in just 10 minutes, but in so doing they miss an island that punches, from a historical and wildlife perspective, above its weight.

In case you were wondering, the stress is on the second syllable, ‘ben-BECK-you-luh’ and the island’s Gaelic name, Beinn na Faoghla, translates as ‘the mountain of the fords’.

The ‘mountain’ in question is Rueval (Ruabhal), which rises to the mighty-mouse height of 124m (406ft) amid a surrounding land of unrelenting atness, and those who reach its summit (an easy climb of 45 minutes) are rewarded with a disproportionately elevated view of the fretwork of innumerable inlets and lochs that speckle the island.

For centuries, this water-world was the stronghold of the MacDonalds of Clanranald, a powerful family from South Uist who held Benbecula after the Norse occupation concluded in the 13th century.

The Clanranalds were descendants of the rst Lord of the Isles, who was also a MacDonald, and they dominated affairs for 500 years (they were ultimately forced to sell Benbecula to pay off bad debts).

The clan’s legacy is visible across the island. One of the oldest buildings on Benbecula is Nunton House, which

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The island of Benbecula is a stepping stone between North and South Uist

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Bonnie Prince Charlie landed on Benbecula in 1746 before escaping to Skye; the ruined medieval chapel and cemetery of Teampull Mhoire; a red-backed sandpiper hiding amid foliage on Benbecula became the clan’s principal residence in the 18th century.

The Clanranalds – and Benbecula more widely – are also deeply interwoven with the travails of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Everyone has heard of the famous Skye Boat Song with its refrain of ‘over the sea to Skye’, far fewer, perhaps, have been curious enough to ask, ‘where from?’ The answer was, of course, Benbecula.

After his botched rebellion and crushing defeat at Culloden in 1746, the Bonnie Prince fled from the loyalist forces and made for the Hebrides. Blown off course in a storm, he was driven up the Minch and on 26 April made landfall on Benbecula’s east coast at Rossinish.

The prince hid around Rueval and other parts of the Uists and was eventually sheltered at Nunton House. Then in June, Lady Clanranald, wife of the clan chief, dressed the prince as an Irish spinning maid, called Betty Burke, thanks to Flora MacDonald, whose branch of the wider Donald clan had supported the prince’s 1745 uprising, and he returned to Rossinish to sail to Skye.

The tale is too often over-romanticised, for the reality would have been gruelling. Before the causeways linking Benbecula to its neighbours were built, the island crossings and coastal edges were among the most treacherous in the Outer Hebrides.

Tidal currents were powerful and terrifyingly fast, fords

© PAUL TOMKINS/VISITSCOTLAND/DANITA DELIMONT/OLIVERR SMART/ALAM Y

It’s fair to say, the prince wouldn’t have had much time or inclination for sightseeing, given the urgency with which the English Crown was breathing down his neck

were marked by a series of cairns and navigable by foot only by those who knew the way in fine weather. Even today, the east side of Benbecula is largely left to its own devices. There is no great farming activity, and it’s particularly hard – even by the standards of the Outer Hebrides – to pick your way through the bogs, inter-tidal marshes, and open moorland.

It’s fair to say the prince wouldn’t have had much time or inclination for sightseeing, given the urgency with which the English Crown was breathing down his neck. Fortunately for modern-day visitors, things are now a little more tranquil on the island, and the appreciable charms of Benbecula are immediately obvious.

Opposite Nunton House stands an 18th-century farmstead, Nunton Steadings. The bell in the front gable is original and was rung to bring workers in from the field.

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Flora MacDonald famously helped the prince to escape to Skye while he was dressed as an Irish spinning maid, and their story is one of the most famous in Scottish folklore; beautiful Benbecula moorland blooming with heather For too long the building, with its slate roofs and casement windows, has been best described as ‘attractively ruined’ but it is now in the process of restoration, becoming mission control for the North Uist Distillery.

Back across the road from the steadings, you’ll find the ruined medieval chapel of Teampull Mhoire. The land where the church now stands was acquired by the Benedictine community of monks on Iona and became known as Baile a’ Mhanaich, ‘the monk’s township’.

In the 16th century, the chapel fell into disrepair. The chapel roof has long gone but the gables and the lower walls hang on, surrounded by tombstones mantled in lichens.

Across the island though, it is the wildlife that can halt you in your tracks. Benbecula is one of the best places in the UK to see hen harriers. Several pairs nest on the island and while you will struggle to spot this creature back on the mainland, where it has been subject to decades of illegal persecution, the chances are, one will fly over you as you make your way around the island.

The male hen harrier is easy to identify as its grey wings appear to be tipped in black ink (the female is brown) and in spring and summer you may observe the male pass a prey item it has caught to its mate in mid-air.

Benbecula’s Culla Bay boasts a chunky slice of coastal sea meadows, known as machair, that run down the east coast of the Outer Hebrides. Thanks to sensitive farming policies, such as laying down seaweed as fertiliser, spring sowing and late harvesting, the land behind the bay is benefiting lapwing and the great yellow bumblebee; the area’s international

© HISTORICAL IMAGES ARCHIVE/ALAMY

This is the land of undulating flatness, as though unseen but gentle eddies were rolling along just under the machair, causing fields to rise like the crest of waves

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The ruins of Howmore are regarded as the most important Christian site in the Outer Hebrides and are believed to date from AD1200 importance as a breeding site for corncrake has seen it designated a Special Protection Area.

Benbecula blurs at its southern fringes into the other realm of the old Clanranald kingdom, South Uist. The two islands today are conjoined by a causeway across the South Ford and where Culla Bay ends, South Uist’s stirring Atlantic coastline picks up the baton, its brilliant white beaches shimmering for an almost unbroken 20 miles. The air feels almost liquid, an absence of light pollution percolated through shallow seas and freshwater lochs.

Travel along one of the long, flat lanes that head for the west coast of South Uist and you reach the fractured remains of walls, gables, and a still-consecrated churchyard. These are the ruins of Howmore (Tobha Mòr), which are regarded by archaeologists as the most important Christian site in the Outer Hebrides. Howmore is believed to have been an important ecclesiastical centre from early medieval times.

Today’s visible remains are thought to date from AD1200 and resemble early Irish–Celtic monastic sites. ‘Tobha’ comes from an old Norse word for ‘mound’, and the four ruined churches and chapels sit on a knoll surrounded by low-lying lumpy and uneven land.

The ruins were also home to the 16th-century Clanranald stone, which bears the coat of arms of the clan. In 1990, the stone was stolen, and only discovered in a London flat five years later, during a house clearance after the occupant died. This prompted media and local talk of a curse that struck anyone who desecrated the site.

The less credulous may simply acknowledge that the site of Howmore and, more widely, South Uist, simply feel ancient. This is a land of undulating flatness, as though unseen but gentle eddies were rolling along just under the machair, causing fields to rise like the crest of waves, hiding the Atlantic Ocean until you are almost upon it.

One supposes this landscape appealed to the Clanranalds because they would have been able to spot any would-be invaders from miles away. A few centuries after the Clanranalds had been whittled to shadows, little, it seemed, had changed. In the 1930s, the photographer Margaret Fay Shaw, who adopted South Uist as her home, wrote of a land with ‘thatched houses standing like haystacks on the ‘rim of the world’. In all honesty, much the same could be said today. S