Mere words can barely describe the mysterious landscape of rocks and sea that make up the Scottish Hebrides, though that hasn’t stopped generations of writers from trying. Edgar Allan Poe wrote of trees that “palpitate like the chill seas around the misty Hebrides.” Charlotte Brontë invoked a poem describing the Atlantic surge that “pours in among the stormy Hebrides.” George Orwell, who sequestered himself on the Isle of Jura to write “1984,” called his craggy redoubt “extremely un-get-at-able.”
On this particular late-summer afternoon, I was trying to get to an isolated island called Raasay aboard a ferry from the farming village of Sconser on the Isle of Skye. Two dolphins swam alongside the boat, delighting the passengers, who jockeyed to photograph them.
After the ferry docked, I walked along a path dominated by the rocky outcroppings of neighboring Skye’s coastline. Skye measures 639 square miles; Raasay, just 24.
Whisky had brought me to the Hebrides, an archipelago with two parts: the Inner Hebrides, about 70 islands slung around Scotland’s southwestern coast, and the Outer Hebrides, more than 100 islands extending westward and northward toward Scandinavia. Some of them are glorified reefs. Others have multiple villages with schools and a castle (or ruins of one). A surprising number have at least one distillery, a feature that guided my journey during the Hebridean Whisky Festival last year.
The Isle of Raasay Distillery, the first on the island, occupies a refurbished Victorian hotel, featuring six renovated rooms and a minimalist restaurant with giant windows looking out onto the sea and oysters harvested that morning.
Alasdair Day, a co-founder, gave me a tour, pouring me a taste of an American-rye-barrel-aged single-malt Scotch, a muscular drink with subtle apricot notes mingling with light smoke, as he explained the distillery’s dual purpose: to make spirits with a recipe he found in his grandfather’s ledger book and bring people to the island — not just to visit, but to live and work. The distillery employs 40 of the island’s 184 residents.
He offered to take me on a drive along Calum’s Road, an almost-two-mile-long lane that twists through the landscape. Calum MacLeod, a postman, farmer and poet, built it single-handedly between 1964 and 1974 to make his remote village more accessible. Mr. Day pointed out curves, rock variations and views as if we were moving through a living sculpture. “It sums up living here: Don’t make more, make better,” he said.
Foraging and Feasting
Raasay is one of the newer entrants in the very old — and increasingly crowded — Scottish whisky-making landscape, part of a trend of intrepid distillers setting up in remote regions like the Hebrides. Travelers are following them, navigating a network of bridges, ferries and winding lanes, and akin to modern Calums, people like Mr. Day are guiding the way.
My wanderings began on Skye, where I arrived via the 1.5-mile Skye Bridge. It’s the only physical connection between the Hebrides and the mainland, making a day trip a feasible option. Because of this, Skye draws a lot of travelers.
Torabhaig, opened in 2017 in an 18th-century farmstead facing an inky bay, is the first new distillery on Skye since 1830, when Talisker began operating. Stewart Dick, my spiky-haired guide, led me up to a cliff, where the wind made it feel as if we were driving, roof down, at 90 miles per hour. Ruins of the 17th-century Knock Castle were silhouetted against the sky.
He explained how peat — decayed, millenniums-old vegetal matter used to fuel fires that dry the barley for Scotch — imbued the drink with complex flavors. We sipped a single malt partly aged in sherry barrels, which he described as the “wardrobe” that dressed the smoky, saline spirit as it aged.
Smoke also played a starring role at the Dunvegan, a restaurant set in a former fort and run by the chef Tim Hunter-Davies and his wife, Blair, a fashion designer who once worked for Armani. When I asked about a smoky lobster dish, the server invited me to the kitchen, where Mr. Hunter-Davis, clad in welding gloves, stood at a grill, using tongs to place pine tips on charcoal to give the meat a forestlike finish. He charred homegrown celeriac and seared bread as he rhapsodized about flames, smoke, embers and ash. That flavor in the lobster? Charred heather.
For an education in Skye’s dense, lush terrain, I made an appointment with Mitchell Partridge, a ghillie, the Gaelic term for a hunting guide. We met at Kinloch Lodge, a country-house hotel in a 400-year-old hunting lodge. Mr. Partridge had a jokey demeanor, but became stern when pointing out what not to eat. His sidekick, a shaggy Border collie named Gilligan, shot ahead as Mr. Partridge led me around the grounds, plucking up bits of plants to taste — salty sea aster, coriander-impersonating arrowgrass, licorice-like angelica, dainty meadowsweet.
An Otherworldly Remoteness
The ocean is the soul of the Hebrides. And once you go farther than the popular Isle of Skye, to the Outer Hebrides, an otherworldly remoteness sets in.
The next day, as my ferry glided across the 30 miles of ocean from Skye to Uist, the land masses got flatter and the waters less turbulent. These islands captivate people like Jonny Ingledew, a native of Uist, a chain of six narrow islands. Like many who grew up in the Hebrides, Mr. Ingledew and his wife, Kate MacDonald, left to attend university on the mainland. Then, unlike many, they returned, determined to bring whisky production back to Uist.
On the drive from my guesthouse, the charming and plaid-adorned Temple View Hotel, to North Uist Distillery, run by the couple, the sky created a dome over the island, its layered bands of blue seamlessly fusing with the water at the horizon. That white truck parked on the roadside? The mobile library. Those gray dots on the grass in the distance? Sheep, of course.
At the distillery, built in a 300-year-old former horse shed, whisky production had only begun, but gin-making was in full swing. In an airy tasting room that had stained-glass windows suggesting a consecrated space, Mr. Ingledew poured tastes of three gins — one heather-leaning, one grapefruit, one bramble and sloe. He pointed out the seals on the bottles, each marked with a name of the local who had foraged the herbs and botanicals.
Mr. Ingledew grew up catching lobsters and langoustines on his father’s fishing boat. They sold them to high-end restaurants across Europe, so I knew I was in the hands of an expert when it came to dining. He drove us to Hougharry Beach, a smooth expanse dotted with binocular-toting walkers who had come for the eagles and orchids, but stayed for the scallop-and-bacon rolls that Anne MacLellan dispensed from her Dunes Cabin food truck. I savored her pillowy lobster roll as she regaled me with tales of growing up on Benbecula, another of Uist’s islands.
This turned out to be the first course in a traveling feast that continued at Charlie’s Bistro, a whitewashed building plunked in the landscape like a lone cactus in a desert. First editions of books by Robert Louis Stevenson and other Scottish writers lined the shelves. I ate flaky, tangy smoked salmon at the bar next to two pilots nursing cups of coffee while they waited out storms on the mainland. And there it was: a reminder of the weather that had inspired Poe, Brontë, Orwell and all those other literary giants.
The Wild, Woolly West
With a thud, the ferry docked in Leverberg, on Lewis and Harris, the largest landmass in the Hebrides. Small cottages evoking square Monopoly houses lined the main road, plied by far more cyclists than drivers.
Harris, famous for its namesake tweed, seems to revolve around crafts. Consider that to make that iconic fabric, regulation dictates that it must be woven in the weaver’s home. The island’s creative appeal did not take long for me to discern. Just across the parking lot from the ferry terminal, I found A.S Apothecary, a rustic shop that calls to mind a Victorian indoor garden — only with a lab. It was run by Amanda Saurin, an English former lawyer and self-described “plantswoman” who relocated to Harris to make skin care products. She also made Wild Eve, a nonalcoholic elixir that she served in a spritz. It tasted of rose petals, chamomile and honeysuckle.
The botanical sparkle lingered on my taste buds as I arrived in the waterside village of Tarbert, where my room at the Hotel Hebrides had an opera-box view of the marina. I walked five minutes to the Isle of Harris Distillery, a cluster of white barnlike buildings backed by stony hills and fronted by the Atlantic. The air was thick with sweet, fresh cereal smells of malted barley simmering in a mash tun, an early step in the whisky-making process.
Gin, not whisky, was the star in the tasting room that day. Its Hebridean flavor came via Lewis Mackenzie, a diver who harvested local sugar kelp for the distillery, a young guide explained to our group.
I remembered something a schoolteacher from Newcastle, a fleeting travel companion, had noted during the ferry ride from Uist. “‘Outer Hebrides’ and ‘Western Isles’ mean the same thing, but ‘Western Isles’ is tame. It could be anywhere,” he said. “‘Outer Hebrides’ is a far more suitable description of what it is — it’s wild, it’s romantic. All sorts of things are followed by ‘Isles,’ but ‘Hebrides’ has that gravitas.”
I sipped the gin, and the maritime notes rang through, clear as the water in a rocky, “extremely un-get-at-able” cove. It tasted like the Hebrides.
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