The Wonder of a Sunday on Lewis & Harris

SCOTLANDBLOG

24 Sept

Outside Arnol Blackhouse on Lewis, I meet an elderly man with JD Salinger eyes. He leans towards me and says: “During the Revival in 1949, the village shook with the presence of God. Pictures slipped from the walls, and a 16-year-old boy was filled with power and preached out on the moor. One by one, the villages fell to the Holy Spirit.” Without another word, he drifts through the blackhouse’s exit door in search of his family.

This impromptu sermon – gloriously out of step with the modern world – was my first impression of Lewis and Harris, the largest island in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides and a last stronghold of Scotland's Bible belt.

Wandering around Tarbert, the largest town on Harris, on a Sunday, the streets are virtually deserted, except for a group of hungry tourists gazing at a closed cafe in disbelief. Outside the closed Harris Tweed Shop, Seagulls drink rainwater from the overflowing dog bowl. In the sea outside the harbour, cruise ships, with bellies full of hundreds of tourists, sail past – not bothering to come ashore on a Sunday.

Lewis's staunch Protestant community has fought to ensure that Christianity rather than commerce has dictated the pattern of everyday life here. They consider Sunday a day of peace and tranquility, and many still observe the old niceties – gardens aren't dug, televisions are not watched, and washing isn't pinned to outdoor clotheslines.

But the stillness of a Lewis and Harris Sunday is being steadily eroded. The writer Louis MacNeice, who visited the Hebrides in the 1930s, described the islands struggle with “tides of unbelief and materialism from the mainland.”

When the first Sunday-breaking ferry sailed from Stornoway in 1989, the Rev Angus Smith lay down on the slipway in protest, islanders sang psalms and wiped away tears as cars were loaded aboard the MV Isle of Lewis ferry. Scheduled flights have popped in and out of Stornoway airport since 2002, and, despite protests, Tesco’s tills bleeped into life in Stornoway on a Sunday for the first time in 2025.

I’m stumped for what to do on a wet Sunday in Tarbert, so I drive through squalls of rain along the Golden Road, named for its high construction cost. The road threads between the bays and crofting settlements of south-east Harris. This land is rocky, low-lying, almost lunar — and it even stood in for alien terrain in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I round a bend and find camper vans hastily parked, their occupants gathered at the shore to watch a colony of seals basking on a tidal island. The thrill is instinctive – the seals are only metres away, sliding in and out of the water as the sun briefly breaks through the clouds. Beside me, I notice something peculiar: a Norwegian man who watches without phone or camera, absorbed in the moment.

The single-track road ends at St Clement’s Church in Rodel, the largest medieval church in the Outer Hebrides. Built from Lewisian gneiss by Alexander MacLeod, 8th Chief of Harris and Dunvegan, the church houses his stone-carved tomb, steeped in medieval silence.

Outside, two Harris-born dog walkers stop to reminisce. “Before the metalled roads, you’d see lines of Sunday worshippers clutching Bibles, walking across the hills to church,” one tells me. It’s an image that could be lifted from a Fellini film.

Though proud of their Harris heritage, both now live and work on the mainland. They tell me the 1949 Hebrides Revival began with “the intense prayers of two elderly sisters, Peggy and Christine Smith — prayers God answered by bringing a spiritual awakening that swept through the islands.”

On Lewis and Harris, the divine is spoken of as readily as the weather – an ordinariness that quietly unsettles my assumptions.

dog walker beach — Horgavost Beach, Harris

At Horgabost Campsite on the west coast of Harris, I abandon the urge to press my nose against the windows of closed shops and instead head for the one place that is always open: the beach.

Horgabost beach is windswept and empty, save for a few dog walkers and Craig and Lorne, a couple from Glasgow who tell me they were joined by porpoises while surfing in a secluded bay. Craig admits, laughing, that he’s “working from my grandmother’s house on Lewis, fibbing to the office that I’m in Glasgow — because I love the peace and quiet here.”

Walking across the soft white sand, I give in to the joy of being in a wild place with nothing in particular to do.

On this Sunday, Lewis and Harris feels like a separate realm. It takes me back to my childhood in Shropshire, to the boredom of a somnolent Sunday when the loudest sound was the toll of church bells.

It was a day apart, unlike any other — and I miss it.

You don’t need to be part of the Christian community on Lewis and Harris to envy the peace, and the release, that comes from stepping back from the madness of modern life for a single day.