In 2006 we were in an old Ford transit van touring around the Lake District. A casual remark of mine about never having been to Scotland saw us crossing the border at Annan. A man in full highland dress walked down the street. I was smitten. Just like that, I fell in love with Scotland.
We devised a plan to take early retirement and, as my mother and father lived with us, they would come too. It was a very loose plan. Over the course of the next year we discovered that ‘the plan’ needed a lot more ‘tweaking’ than we had originally envisaged. We realised that research was the key factor. I just wish we had followed our own advice!
The problem with being in love is that it is a form of madness. It is like a drug and you become addicted and somewhat crazy. You do mad things that don’t feel insane at the time. In retrospect, writing it down in black and white that is when you ask yourself “What was I thinking!”
So it was that in October 2010 we sold our home at Newport on the Isle of Wight and moved over 700 miles to Skigersta on the Isle of Lewis. Door to door a journey of a little over 16 hours. The half way point – in time, not distance – is Glasgow.
Isle of Wight born and bred
My Dad stood at the top of our garden steps by the billboard stating: SOLD (subject to contract). An Isle of Wighter born and bred and proud of it. Dad in boyhood was a mischievous Boy Scout. Looking at him there, he was more like an itinerant journey-man tinker with a rucksack on his back, a pair of scissors to hand and an enamel cup dangling down the side. His cap jauntily tilted looking the picture of health he stood there beaming from ear to ear. He was nearly ninety. An arthritic old man with a stick in either hand. The grin of joy etched in the wrinkles of his happy face sent a warm feeling to my heart.
The cat, his constant companion, was sliding and slinking around his legs, never too far from his old friend and benefactor. Theirs was a bond that lasted until death stole the friendship, as it always does. As a young Royal Navy CPO in war torn Britain, Dad had survived the Russian, Arctic and Atlantic convoys with many adventures of derring-do, but this was to be his last.
An unlikely cast of characters for an adventure
Add my husband and me and you have an unlikely cast of four characters who wandered off from our known world into a landscape filled with cobalt skies, vivid and electric blue, Mediterranean-coloured azure seas and beaches as glorious as those in the Caribbean. Nature is allowed to paint such a scene and you do not argue it’s too bright nor too blue.
When an artist depicts the same landscape to an eye that has not seen it, scepticism creases the brow of the beholder. The world is so much wider on Lewis. Standing on the moors, with the larks singing their ascendance into heaven, it is like being within a snow globe. Aware that the sky is your ceiling, you turn slowly around your 180 degree view but, no snow – it’s just clean pure air. Take a deep breath and pause, momentarily, to breathe it all in. That is what it feels like to be alive!
We went because we could and it felt wrong not to go. It is sad if we regret what we have done; it is sadder to regret what we have not done.
We did not leave the Isle of Wight because we didn’t like it – indeed, we have since returned. We left because we wanted to do something different and something to challenge ourselves. Materialism and living to work was not enough – or, maybe it was too much?
How did you end up on Lewis?
People question us: Why Lewis? Ah, now, thereby hangs another tale. That was not where the adventure was meant to begin. It all started to unfold at Easter in 2007 when we went to view a certain idyllic cottage through rose tinted spectacles at the edge of the beach on the island of Benbecula.
To be continued…
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