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The last frontier
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WANDERLUST Rishad Saam Mehta drives along the stunning Outer Hebrides in Scotland
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Massive landmark The whalebone arch on the gateway of a house on the Isle of Harris
The Outer Hebrides are Scotland’s last frontier. A clump of rock off the Western coast of Scotland, these 130 mile long islands take all the brunt of the mighty Atlantic and there is really nothing between them and Canada.
It’s a place that is desolate and wild and immensely scenic with moody weather that can sometimes lash down in sharp stinging needles of rain at one moment and spring rainbows at the next. To get here it’s a 105 minute ferry ride. I’d driven my Toyota Prius onto this ferry at Uig on the Isle of Skye and driven off it at Tabert on the Isle of Harris.
Now I was driving down the lovely roads that crisscross these Islands. I’d driven past pristine beaches, 5,000-year-old Celtic tombs, ancient villages and a landscape dimpled with lochs. It had taken me over four hours to do 100 miles – not because the roads were bad, but because the scenery was a visual overdose. And, coming back to the roads – they were fantastic. The kind of roads where you’d want to bring your sports car to play.
It was near the town of Bragar on the Isle of Harris that I came across a house that seemed to have a huge ornamental arch over its gateway. And in the centre of this arch hung something that I thought was a bell. It all looked very temple-like and so I stopped to have a closer look.
The ‘bell’ was in fact some sort of spear and as I was trying to figure out the whole contraption of arch and spear, Mrs Hazel Morrison stepped out of the house beyond the arch and smiled at me.
“That’s from a whale dear,” she said.
To say I was a little shocked would be an understatement. That arch was made from the lower mandible of a blue whale. It formed the jaw of that mammal.
Mrs. Morisson then told me the story of how in the September of 1920 a great 82 foot long blue whale had washed up on the bay close-by. The spear that was hanging in the centre of the arch was in fact a harpoon that had been stuck in it back with a thick rope trailing from it.
Harpoons usually had explosives in them that released claws once the harpoon was imbedded in the whale. This ensured that it wouldn’t slip out. This harpoon had failed to explode. In fact it was during the salvaging of the whale when the harpoon was removed and dropped to the ground that it exploded, but no one was hurt.
Mrs. Morrison’s father-in-law, Murdo Morrison, the village postmaster and general merchant was one of the people involved in this whole operation of disposing off the dead whale and decided to take a momento from it. And so this whalebone arch came into being.
Today it has become a tourist attraction in its own right and you can read the detailed story at http://www.ceats.org.uk/Whalebone.htm
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