Outer Hebrides Trip – Berneray and North Uist

After visiting Barra I finished up the day on North Uist in a place called Lochmaddy, the ferry from Skye stops here. I was staying in a fantastic little hotel called the Tigh Dearg Hotel – I can thoroughly recommend it. I had a bit of a dilemma as to where to go for dusk photos and after much dithering I took the plunge and drove over to Berneray.

Berneray is a small island just of the tip of North Uist and is connected by a causway. The island is roughly 2 miles by 3 miles in size and has approximately 125 residents.

I was aiming for the long beach which runs up pretty much the whole of the west side of the Island and after a short while I arrived at the location and made the 10 minute walk to get to the beach. The sun had just set as I arrived which meant I didn’t have much time to find a spot and get set-up, luckily I didn’t really need to go too far. From here I could see the island of Boreray and Pabbay and the mountains of South Harris – see the map below.

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The beach was like many of the beaches on the Outer Hebrides – soft white sand and large. In the light of the gloaming the whole place seemed to glow, it was breath taking and I think the photo below has captured that glow. On the horizon you can see the mountains of South Harris

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Here are a selection of images captured on the beach at Berneray.

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The following morning after completing work that I needed to do in Lochmaddy I had a couple of hours to go until the next ferry across to Harris. The hotel owner had recommended a beach known as Traigh Ear which wasn’t too far away from the hotel on the north west coast of North Uist. I went there to check it out and was not disappointed and is definitely a location I would like to go back to to explore more. Here are a few shots that I got while I was there, due to the time of day the light was harsh again just like it was the day before on Barra.

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The thing that struck me the most apart from the sheer size of the beach was the large ripples left in the sand by the tide which I hope I’ve managed to pick out in the photos.

After visiting Traigh Ear I caught the ferry from Berneray back to Leverburgh on South Harris. I had some work to do in Tarbert and then I was planning to visit Luskentyre beach in the evening – this will be the subject of my next post.