The Guga Hunt

This article is a refreshingly balanced review of the debate surrounding the guga hunt at Sula Sgeir. Guga is the salted meat of chicks of the northern gannet. These birds nest on islands like Sula Sgeir. Each year, a group of men from the villages of Ness in Lewis go there and harvest the birds by killing them as humanely as possible, cleaning and salting them. It is apparently a delicacy. The number of birds culled was decreased from 2,000 to 500 in recent times.

There is a very vocal campaign to deny the guga hunt a renewed license, for reasons of animal welfare. Videos are doing the rounds of the birds being culled and processed. That is certainly not a pleasant process, but think of it this way. Do you want to think about the process that turns that cow in a field into a steak on your plate? In the case of the guga, that process is in full public view. You may as well petition the government to ban slaughterhouses.

Another change

In a way, I am sad to note Sir Keir Starmer's resignation as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I would be fully prepared to accept that he meant well, but the way he went about matters eventually left him with no other option. 

After the Conservatives kept changing their leaders, there was hope that Labour would be a stable breath of fresh air. It turned into the same stale guff, so voters turned to Reform UK out of sheer exasperation in last month's local elections. 

Andy Burnham was elected on a 55% share of the vote in the Makerfield by-election last week - so he is now carrying the hope of the nation. He is likely to be elected leader of the Labour Party so, I can only say: Actions speak louder than words.

Sandwick Stones

Between November 2025 and February 2026, I photographed all the gravestones in New Sandwick Cemetery. There are some 2,100 stones, showing over 4,000 names. 

Using the findagrave site, I have transcribed the data from inscriptions (if legible) onto an Excel database. Currently, I am adding the family connections - where possible. There are 150 gravestones with no or illegible inscriptions. 

The final item will be a full transcription of the inscription on all the gravestones - which will be a huge task. I intend to hand this over to Stornoway Historical Society once complete. 

Next item on the agenda then will be the Old Cemetery; this was transcribed in the 1990s, an invaluable body of work as inscriptions have now faded, sometimes into oblivion, under the influence of acid rain, sandblow and encroaching lichen. 

The Old Cemetery has 500 stones, showing 1,500 names. The New Cemetery is quite orderly, with stones standing in rows. The Old Cemetery is old, and stones are higgledy-piggledy across the precinct. I may have to use temporary little marker to show which ones I have covered. 

Beyond that, I'll move on to the other 20-odd burial grounds in Lewis and Harris. And an extension to Uist and Barra is in my mind. 

The picture is my favourite, taken in the New Cemetery on 20 December 2025, just 12 minutes before sunset.

Starmer - 2

I'm watching the political machinations in Westminster.
Not impressed.

Because the problem is not Reform UK. The problem is one that the government is failing to address, leaving a huge void that Nigel Farage's outfit are only too happy to fill with a lot of populist guff.

Whilst Keir Starmer is slowly losing power and influence, there is an unedifying spectacle of potential rivals posturing and jostling for position. One wrote a resignation letter with sulphuric acid.
Another is offered the seat of a sitting MP, who is resigning so they can fight a by-election. And
what would be the excoriating supreme irony? If Reform UK were to win the Makerfield by-election. Because they are sensing blood, if not already lapping it up. Yet, the underlying problem causing their popularity - remains unresolved.

Starmer

There is an issue in British society that is not being addressed by the government of the day. It did for the Conservatives, and the fact that Labour is now also tearing itself apart is indicative of this problem. A further pointer are the massive election wins by Reform UK in the local elections last week; also the large numbers of seats they gained at Holyrood and Cardiff Bay.

Reform UK is a single-issue protest party, focused on immigration. And whatever also ails Britain is deflected onto that issue. The matter of the small boats, it would appear, is the result of the actions of *one* individual gangmaster, who has (thus far) eluded capture by European authorities. From my perspective, the French authorities seem to be either powerless or unwilling to make a concerted effort to deal with the migrant camps between the Belgian border and Boulogne-sur-mer.

Throwing Keir Starmer under the bus will not resolve those issues. Any successor will be confronted by the same problems.

May I remind readers of pre-war Germany, where Adolf Hitler promised to deal with all the ills of German society, post-WW1 - by victimising one group in society. 

The flame is a warning from the past. 

Ferry crisis

The ferry crisis is anything but a laugh. It poses a serious threat to the economy of these islands, including tourism. The visitor season is just about starting up again, with Easter only a few days away.

Asking Calmac for an explanation, as our esteemed MSP has done, is like asking why the tap is open that is causing a flood in the pantry. Someone should step up to the plate and close the tap.

Dr Allan is the candidate for the current party of government in Holyrood, which carries a heavy burden of responsibility. I have stated before that it is not possible to open a can of ferry ships, should the existing fleet turn out to be a collection of rusting hulks.

Sealladh na Beinne Mòire

Sealladh na Beinne Mòire is an estate, covering parts of Benbecula, South Uist and Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides. It came into community ownership in 2007, but has been fraught with disputes and strife. 

As it has not submitted annual reports to Companies House, which regulates companies across the United Kingdom, it has been issued to what is termed a First Gazette notice. This is the preamble for the dissolution of a company, usually following two months after the initial notice.  

Last month, the directors of Sealladh na Beinne Mòire agreed to step down, and the three local councillors took over as temporary directors. This was followed by a First Gazette notice on 10th March. Our MSP (Member of Scottish Parliament) has issued a statement. And I'm not impressed. 
  
I am very sorry, but the closing lines of this report displeased me. 

I'd rather refrain from expressing my view of an MSP who does not know the implications of a First Gazette notice, has to ask the Scottish Government (like a good boy) what its views are on the possible implications of that notice - the implications are the dissolution of Sealladh na Beinne Mòire. He should be screeching down the A865 to Dalabrog, bang a few heads together, including those of the three councillors who were appointed interim directors last month, and make sure the notice gets cancelled.

I hold strong views about community ownership, as I have outlined in previous postings on various social media outlets. There are quite a few success stories in the Highlands and Islands, such as Assynt, Eigg and Galson (the latter here in Lewis). Sometimes, achieving community ownership involved hard graft against unwilling landowners, as was the case with the Pairc Trust in South Lochs. Sealladh na Beinne Mòire cannot be allowed to fail.

Changes

Reading back through my notes of yesteryear. Little change, yet so much has changed.
At one point, I found it necessary to struggle through bogs and moorland between the Pentland Road and the hills of Meannan and Beinn Mholach.
All those years later, I can just walk up a well-made track - to windturbines, whirring round on the summits of Meannan and Beinn Mholach.
Oh, should I wish to do so, I can walk past the turbines and head northwest into the moor towards Dalmore. Or east, back towards Stornoway along the shores of Loch Garbhaig


Peatbogs on Meannan, August 2005


Track from Pentland Road windfarm, June 2013


Loch Garbhaig, looking east towards Stornoway, June 2013

Mary Anne Macleod

I live in the island from where Mary Anne Macleod set forth to seek a new existence in the New World. She did return here from time to time, worshipped in the church I attend each Sunday. Mary Anne later became mother to five children, one of whom is now the 47th President of the USA: Donald J. Trump.
We raise our children, and instil in them values we hold dear. When they have grown up, they go forth into the world and make a life for themselves to the best of their abilities. What they do with that upbringing is their responsibility.
People in the island of Lewis do not talk about Donald Trump. His behaviour is not the way things are done in the Western Isles, and are a disgrace to his heritage. His behaviour is not the fault of his late mother, he is responsible, as a man of nearly four score years, for his own actions. I never knew Mary Anne Macleod, she died five years before I came to live in Stornoway. I do know people who met her. When I stand at the gate at the bottom of Cross Street, a quiet back street in Stornoway, I glance over to the row of houses on Ford Terrace in Tong. To the demure dwellings in the village beyond. And wonder what she would have made of her son's career in politics. Isn't it the case that she warned never to let Domhnall Iain anywhere near politics?

Holocaust Memorial Day - 2026

Today it is 81 years ago since the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated by Soviet forces. More than a million people, mainly Jews, were killed there during the Second World War. The process was conducted as an industrial process. To date, some of the goods left behind by the victims of the Holocaust remain on display. These include suitcases with name tags, spectacle frames, hair and shoes. I have never visited Auschwitz and am not likely to.

January 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day, remembering all the victims of the Nazi's policy of extermination of all those they considered to be sub-human.

Holocaust Memorial Day remembers all victims of genocide.

We must never forget.

Greenland

Looks like the son of 5A Tong has swept aside all the conventions, treaties and understandings that have kept Europe broadly safe and peaceful for the last 80 years or so. I'm not overlooking the war in the Balkans, nor the current invasion of Ukraine. 

After flouting the rule of law by forcibly removing the (admittedly unelected) president of a sovereign country, namely Venezuela's ruler Nicolas Maduro, the power has gone to the head of the US president. 

Taking a leaf out of the book, written by Vladimir Putin, he now seeks to grab what he wants, never mind that Greenland is a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, a close ally. He threatens all who verbally oppose his ambitions, and / or those that support Denmark and the Greenlanders in maintaining the status-quo. All the words of condemnation from various European leaders are just that: words. 

It looks that Donald Trump, like Putin, now only understands the rule of the bully, the rule of force. This could well spell the end of NATO, and expose us to the risk of an active threat from Russia. 

Trump turns 80 in June. His own mother once said: don't let Donald John anywhere near politics. How true Mary Anne Macleod's words now ring. 

 

11 January 2005

Twenty-one years ago today, 11th January started as your usual winter's day in the Islands. But when darkness fell, the wind rose to a screaming crescendo. Stornoway was battered by 100 mph winds, the old school I was staying in at South Lochs shook under the onslaught. Blue flashing lights across the water in Laxay indicated that police had closed the A859 to Tarbert, after a busdriver reported a sheep flying past his window. Power went off for 48 hours in my location, up to six days in nearby Sildenis. We all hunkered down in darkness, waiting for the storm to blow itself out. 

The next morning, 9 am. Phew, that was a bad one. Roof off here, trees down in the Lews Castle Grounds, boats wrecked at Newton. You got any damage? 

News began to filter north from South Uist. Five members of the same family missing out of Lionacuidhe, on the South Ford. They had fled towards the causeway in two cars, but never arrived. As the winds abated, a search of the Ford, the channel between South Uist and Benbecula, yielded all the missing. Lost to a storm surge the evening before. 

I can never bear to see the faces of the two wee ones lost that night. Or those if their parents and grandfather. 

I'll just post the link to the news report. 

RIP.

Lockerbie - 37 years on

Wednesday, 21st December 1988. 7.03pm. Flight PanAm 103 was en-route from London to New York, when it disappeared off air traffic control radar, substituted by several fragments, which fell to the ground. One piece slammed into the town of Lockerbie. All on board the plane were killed, alongside eleven townspeople from Lockerbie when houses were destroyed by falling debris and fire. The plane had been brought down by a bomb, planted by terrorists allegedly linked to the then Libyan government of Col Ghadaffi. The full chain of command for the attack has never been fully clarified, in public at any rate, and there are questionmarks as to why security services didn't manage to foil the plot. One man was put on trial, convicted and sentenced. In 2009, he was released on compassionate grounds and repatriated to Libya.

All that is immaterial to the relatives and friends of those killed. They are remembered in a memorial on Sherwood Crescent in Lockerbie, which was flattened by the downed plane. We remember them all. 

Image courtesy BBC

July 1981. On my way north with family for the annual holiday. As we headed north up the A74, an all enveloping horror made me lie down on the back seat. I cannot explain what it was about, or why. But after I had given in to my emotion, I looked up again and asked where we were. "Lockerbie", came the answer, and I saw the sign for the A709 turn-off to Lockerbie and Lochmaben flash by.


The same sign that can be seen in the footage from December 1988. The location where parts of the plane came down. Don't ask me to explain the coincidence. I can't.

In 1988, I was a student in Holland, and given to watch rubbish on the television. That evening, the Lockerbie images flashed by - and that road sign. A74 Glasgow, the North - A709 Lockerbie, Lochmaben.

May the innocent victims of Lockerbie, from the plane, or on the ground, all rest in peace.

Pearl Harbor Day

On 7th December 1941, the Empire of Japan attacked the United States' Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was to bring the US into the Second World War, after more than two years at the sidelines of the conflict. This move signalled the beginning of the end for the Japanese Empire: one of its leaders observed that we have wakened a giant. Three years and eight months later, an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and another one on Nagasaki prompted the surrender of Japan. The war in the Pacific was brutal, and indescribably atrocities were visited upon those under Japanese occupation, not to mention upon any prisoners, or prisoners of war.

The Japanese emperor was stripped of his status as a deity in exchange for not having to face war crimes charges. Japan has never apologised, for whatever good that would have done, for its actions during WW2; and its neighbours, like Korea and China, still regard the land of the Rising Sun with suspicion.

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #30

 NaBloPoMo comes to a close for another year, and once again, I have not blogged every day in November. I have not been in the habit of blogging regularly since I took to writing on Facebook. However, a blog affords you the space to write more expansively, and you have more versatility in posting pictures. Late November sees some very short days here, with sunset before 4 pm. I shall close NaBloPoMo for 2025 with some images at dusk, taken last Friday, 28th November. 

I'll continue to blog irregularly going forward. 

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #29

 I have been in the Isle of Lewis for 21 years now, and things never seem to change. They are going to now in a major fashion. The local authority has granted planning permission in principle for the construction of an electricity converter station, just south of the Lews Castle Grounds near Macaulay Farm. This is near the turn-off for Arnish on the A859 road towards Tarbert. The electricity hub will convert the AC current, generated by on-shore and off-shore windturbines, to DC for transmission down a 50-mile subsea cable to the Scottish mainland. Landfall will be at Dundonnell, south of Ullapool, and the cable will continue further east towards Beauly, near Inverness. 

The converter station will stretch a total of 400 yards, with buildings rearing up to 90 feet into the sky.  It will be visible from far and wide, and basically turn that area of the island into an industrial wasteland. 

Yesterday, I walked down to the Arnish Road, upon seeing reports that the double-tracking of that road had commenced. This is part of the project. It was not pretty, and I find it horrible to see vegetation stripped off the bedrock and diggers tearing up the land. Some call it progress. I don't really agree. 

Who is going to benefit from those renewable energy projects? We are supposed to get £4.5m per annum in community benefit, except this will now be syphoned off into a Scotland-wide pot from whence we'll get zilch. Jobs? Just for a couple of years, and the majority of the work will be done by imported labour. These people will be housed in accommodation blocks at Willowglen and Sandwick - only to move away once the project is complete in 2031. 

Another gripe. The landfall station for the offshore windfarm will be north of the Barvas Machair, in (what the developer admits is) challenging terrain. Initially, they referred to the machair as scrubland. It is in fact a protected habitat. But it's money that talks here. And government policy. 

 

 

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #23

 The war in Ukraine is moving towards its 4th anniversary next February. In 2022, the Russian Federation invaded the territory of its western neighbour, having already occupied the Crimea and areas of the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014 through proxies. Ukraine is resisting valiantly, but is inexorably, slowly losing terrain and men. As Russia invaded without provocation, any ceasefire that includes ceding territory to Russia by Ukraine would be unfair. However, that is exactly what Donald "Chamberlain" Trump is proposing. Let's not forget what preceded this war. 

Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, assisted a secessionist movement in Abchazia, a rebellious province of Georgia (on the east coast of the Black Sea) in splitting off from Georgia. Apart from loud protests back in August 2008, no military consequences ensued. Putin occupied the Crimea, part of Ukraine, in March 2014, without any military consequences. Putin's forces allegedly shot down a civilian airliner over the east of Ukraine in July 2014, with the loss of 300 lives - without any retalitatory action. Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This time round, Ukraine's allies rallied round with supplies of military hardware and intelligence. When Donald Trump became US president in January, he started off by giving Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zhelensky a row in the White House. Trump likes strongmen, like North Korea's Kim Jong Un and Russia's Putin. And Putin manipulates Trump. 

We saw in the 1930s what happens when you try to pacify aggressors. "Peace for our time", Neville Chamberlain said in November 1938, upon adorning a piece of paper with some more ink in Munich. Adolf Hitler did not pay the slightest attention, but invaded Czechoslovakia the next year, followed by Poland in September 1939. Only then did we have a declaration of war from Britain and France. Had these allies stood up to Hitler upon his incursions into the Rhineland in 1936, for instance, war might have been averted. But we'll never know. 

We'll see what happens if Trump's peacedeal is adopted. 

 

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #19

 Today, Western Isles Council decided to grant planning permission in principle to build an electricity  converter station on the outskirts of Stornoway. The station will be massive, measuring several hundred meters by several hundred meters, rearing up to 27 metres in height. It is required to convert electricity, generated by renewable energy projects across Lewis for transport to the mainland. A sub-sea cable has already been approved; it will have a capacity of 1,800 megawatts. In the 21 years I have been in the island, I have been vocal in my opposition to such on-shore and off-shore schemes. It will have a massive detrimental environmental impact, for one. And the benefit for Lewis will only be short-term, and even the employment may not be locally sourced. And by 2031, we'll be left with an industrial wasteland. I am very disappointed. 

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #17

 Eight years ago tonight, my uncle passed away, at the blessed age of 90. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, and had spent the last months of his life in a hospice. When I saw him on his 90th birthday, the previous January, he was a well-to-do nonagenarian, his usual affable, smiling self. Ten months later, there was little left of him. I was relieved he had been spared further suffering. 

My uncle, my father's eldest brother, had been married, but his wife had pre-deceased him in 1998, also after having cancer. They had lived together in the same tied cottage for 44 years, and my uncle stayed on until he died in 2017. It fell to members of the family to clear out ten skipfuls of detritus from years gone by. I don't think they ever bought new furniture, and the books were of similar vintage. I remember a ginger cat, and, from further back, chickens. 

Although he never had a family, my uncle was very fond of my siblings and myself, and supported our mother when she was in the final years of her life, up to 2008. Following the death of my father in 2022, there is only one sibling left of the four. My father's second brother was killed in a motorbike accident in 1954, when he crashed into an unilluminated American army truck, which did not have permission to be out and about. The youngest, my auntie, remains, now aged 78. 

Tempus fugit.  

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #11

 On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the guns fell silent. Fifteen million lay dead. Just because an archduke got shot in Sarajevo? Because the royal houses of Europe decided to have a family tiff? No, it's never as simplistic as that. But this post is not about the reasons for the Great War. It is about those fifteen million. Servicemen from all sides, civilians from all sides. It was the age of duty, you signed up because you felt it was your duty. Duty towards King and Country. If you didn't volunteer, if you tried to dodge the draft, you were a coward. You could be handed a white feather, oh, the disgrace. But that overlooked the genuine panic and fear that had some 3,000 shot at dawn. Only very recently have these unfortunate souls been exonerated, and their honour restored to them.

I compiled listings of the men from the island of Lewis in particular, and from the Outer Hebrides in general, who went to war from August 1914 until November 1918. When focusing on Lewis, their number stands at roughly 6,200. The number of dead is not set in tablets of stone; I have it at roughly 1,300. It matters not. Of that number, 181 were lost seven weeks after the Armistice, when their transport, HMY Iolaire, sank off Stornoway. Twenty others were Iolaire crew.

We all fall silent at 11 in the morning on November 11th. I have marked the occasion for thirty-fiveyears now, initially listening to the event on BBC Radio 4 longwave, 198 kHz. Not until I came to Stornoway, in November 2004, did I start to actively observe the Armistice. I have photographed the war memorials here, each stating the war to have ended in 1919, unlike everywhere else in the UK, where the end year is 1918. I have photographed over 400 wargraves and war-related gravestones in the island's cemeteries. I have compiled my findings on several websites, for all to see - at no charge. It's not for money that I have done this work. 

Lest we forget.