How a solo trip to a remote island reeling from tragedy gave me hope & More News Here

It felt serendipitous. I used to be in lockdown in Glasgow, craving nature and area, and the considered spending six weeks on a remote island with a small inhabitants, the place I might swim and see deer and eagles, be surrounded by the wild sea and the weather – all that solitude and freedom – felt like a present. So, too, did the possibility to work in Scotland, in my very own accent – one thing I’ve hardly ever finished, regardless of being a born and bred Glaswegian. Because of the roles I have performed, most individuals assume I’m from Lancashire.

So I drove from Glasgow to Ullapool, the place I caught the ferry to Stornoway, the capital of Lewis, a four-hour journey throughout the Minch, a notoriously bumpy physique of water. The waves crashed and the ferry pitched and rolled, however I stored my eyes mounted on the shoals of porpoises leaping in entrance of us, so serene and exquisite.

The ferry lurched into Stornoway, the place I had organized to keep in a cottage close by for the primary night time, and it was then that I first encountered the terrible tragedy that also hangs over Lewis. 

The cottage sat shut to a memorial for HMY Iolaire, an Admiralty Yacht which, in January 1919, had been carrying 280 sailors dwelling to the island from the First World War. The boat was overcrowded and the climate wild. As it tried to negotiate the route into port, it crashed in opposition to a rocky outcrop solely yards from the shore, sinking shortly and killing 200 of its passengers. The island misplaced so a lot of its males that night time and it stays the UK’s worst peacetime maritime catastrophe.

I had examine how profoundly affected the islanders nonetheless are by the tragedy and the way shut they maintain it to their hearts. Our movie handled the identical interval, when younger boys had been referred to as up to go to conflict, so it felt proper to spend my first morning visiting the memorial. I stood beside it, looking at the exact same rocks that had cruelly prevented the Lewis troopers – who had given a lot – from returning dwelling. 

It was highly effective. Standing there, I understood profoundly why the tragedy remains to be so potent for the folks of Lewis, and felt extra keenly than ever the necessity to reevaluate what I wished from life, to perceive what my goal was.

Much of the solid opted to keep in Stornoway, however I knew that if I used to be going to do that correctly, I wanted to go additional. Instead, I stayed in one of many two Moorpark cottages, perched on high of the moor in Barvas, owned by Marlene and Angus Macleod. They had been so great and type to me, bringing banana bread and, as soon as the legal guidelines relaxed a little, inviting me for Sunday lunch.

Other than these visits, and filming two or three days a week, I used to be completely solitary – simply being with myself, visiting locations, watching eagles, studying and writing a lot. Though it had been a few years since I had finished any cold-water swimming, I’d reacquainted myself with it throughout lockdown and had come to Lewis armed with a wetsuit. 

I started to analysis which shorelines had been sufficiently sheltered, with friendlier tides, and finally settled on Reef Beach. I steeled my nerves and donned the wetsuit, then walked down to the water’s edge, throughout the mushy abandoned sand, and gently eased into the water – discovering, to my shock, that the ocean was astonishingly, deliciously heat. 

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