This is an extract from my new book “Travels through History : 10 Scottish Islands” available here.

Stornoway is the principal town on the island of Lewis and is the gateway to the island and to the whole of the Outer Hebrides. Loganair flies from Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Inverness to Stornoway several times a day from Monday to Friday, twice a day on Saturday and once a day on Sunday. There are also return flights to Benbecula twice a week. The Caledonian MacBrayne (Calmac) ferry terminal is just beyond the bus station. Ferries sail to Ullapool two or three times a week. Buses run from Stornoway all over the island, though there are no bus services on a Sunday. 

There aren’t too many sights in the town itself. The harbour has activity in the early morning with the landing of fish. Lews Castle is visible across the water. This castle is a 19th-Century edifice built by Sir James Matheson, with money earned from tea and from opium. Recently, a massive restoration program converted the castle into luxury self-catering accommodation; however, the grand public rooms on the ground floor remain free to visit when unoccupied. When Donald J Trump visited Stornoway to see the place where his mother lived in her early days (she was a McLeod, I believe), he did not help towards the costs of the restoration. 

Sir James Matheson was behind one of the worst examples of removals from the land in Scottish history. This occurred between 1851 and 1855. He decided to ‘emigrate’ many of his destitute tenants through a programme of eviction and ‘assisted’ transportation to Canada. No fewer than 2,327 men, women, and children faced the bleak choice of either being cleared from the land or emigrating with little chance of return. In 1851, before the evictions, the population of Lewis outside Stornoway was 17,320. The proportion ‘emigrated’ accounted for just over 13% of that total. 

Of the first 1,512 selected, only forty-five took the offer of support for the voyage to Canada. The rest had to be made to go. Another strange fact about Matheson was that he spent over £107,000 on the island of Lewis between 1845 and 1850 on famine relief and public works. Yet, between 1848 and 1851, he obtained 1,367 summonses of removal against his tenants.