The Sun Shines on Scalpay (2)
I straddle my bicycle and head purposefully up the gentle brae towards the main village, straddling the isthmus between the island's two fine harbours. The island of Scalpay, which lies off the Harris coast some miles south-east of Tarbert, is surprisingly little known. That seems rather a pity, on a day like this when every rock and boulder on the Harris mainland glows in the light of an early sun, when the hills of Harris are dusted with light snow as delicately as doughnuts with icing sugar, when a lark is singing on and on and on high in the deep blue sky. It is one of those wonderful Hebridean days early in the year, a day after sodden and determined rain and sleet, when the sun rises in a clear sky upon a world made new.
The well maintained road crests a small hill and turns over a little bridge at the head of a tidal inlet, running along the seaside slope towards the harbour and village centre. Wrack floats calmly in the sucking ebb of the tide. The remains of some ancient ship - her rotted ribs deep in the mud, her great boiler rusting beneath a skeletal wheelhouse - lie embedded in the shore. And then I bowl round the corner and there is the main village; the primary-school, a shop or two, the harbour with its modern pier, and a fine view up East Loch Tarbert towards the distant chimneys of Tarbert itself.
