The Sound of Mull runs between the island of Mull and the Scottish mainland for twenty-five miles — a passage that changes character with every hour of the tide and every shift of the wind. Tobermory, Mull’s principal village, is the most photographed harbour in Scotland: the coloured houses along the waterfront have appeared on so many biscuit tins and calendars that the real thing, approached from the water on a summer evening with the tide running and the town reflected in the still harbour, has a quality of familiarity that adds to rather than diminishes the pleasure.
The Corryvreckan is the third-largest whirlpool in the world, in the channel between the islands of Jura and Scarba. At spring tides the overfalls and standing waves reach four metres; the sound of it carries across the Sound of Jura on a quiet day. Passage through the Corryvreckan requires careful timing and a captain who has done it before; the reward is access to the anchorages of Jura’s west coast, which are among the finest in the Hebrides.
The Outer Hebrides — Lewis and Harris, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Barra — face the Atlantic with nothing between them and North America for three thousand miles. The landscape is the most ancient in Britain: the Lewisian gneiss beneath your feet is 3,000 million years old. Luskentyre beach on the island of Harris is routinely cited as one of the finest beaches in Europe — a kilometre of white shell-sand with the kind of turquoise water that seems geographically improbable at this latitude.
The Gaelic culture of the Hebrides is not a performance for visitors. The island communities have maintained their language and traditions through the same conditions that produced the landscape: difficulty, weather and isolation as a way of life rather than a marketing concept.