There was a joke doing the rounds when I was first visiting the Outer Hebrides more than three decades ago. On the flight to Stornoway, halfway across the Minch, the pilot makes an announcement: “We will shortly be arriving on the Isle of Lewis. Don’t forget to turn your watches back two … hundred years.”
And there was, indeed, as you arrived on the islands for the first time, a sense of stepping back in time – to a place and a culture that had changed little in perhaps centuries.
