The ancient inhabitants of the Isle of Lewis clearly anticipated the coming of the tourist in his motor car as all the interesting sites are easily accessable along the road which runs along the north west coast. We worked our way along the road stopping at each place, probably six different places, bumping into the same tourists on the same trip.
All the sights feature stones, above and is the Calanais stone circle, no one really knows why it was built and it is surprising that it is still here after a couple of thousand years, you would think a medieval builder would help himself to those nicely cut stones.
Next stop was a Broch (picture above), a large stone building built between 1,900 and 2,300 years ago. It is an early example of cavity wall construction, it has two walls with a passageway with stairs in between the two walls, quite a big building and a lot more impressive than the houses which are about 100 years old known as Black Houses, shown right.
Why are they called Black Houses? Because they are not white!
When they started building more modern houses using lime mortar or limewash these were white and called white houses so the older buildings were then rebranded Black.
There was also a stone mill, a stone kiln and a stone circle so you could say we were well and truly st...... by the end of the day but that would be too obvious.