Your flight to Barra brings you to Scotland’s Western Isles or Outer Hebrides’ southern tip, home for 500 of the past 600 years to clan MacNeil since being granted Barra in 1427. Barra boasts Britain’s only airfield flooded twice daily by Atlantic tides and famous Ealing comedy Whisky Galore’s film locations, based on a real-life shipwrecked whisky incident.
Explore Castlebay’s impregnable Kisimul Castle, restored after American architect Robert MacNeil bought Barra back for the clan in 1937, and Barra Heritage Centre with its tales of potato famine, the clearances and emigrations. Meet the locals at a traditional ceildih (pronounced kay-lee).
Away from the crowds savour stunning shorelines and rocky bays or try the Barra Challenge: fishing all of its named lochs in one day. Discover Barra’s standing stones and Viking crosses, or take ferries further afield – to Oban from Castlebay or both Eriksay and South Uist from Aird Mhor.
Locals still have to import whisky, but you can have a taste of Barra from the Highland Toffee Company’s traditional Scottish tablet (more like fudge) made overlooking Kisimul Castle.< |