My Passionate Love Affair With Scotland’s Largest Island

On the surface, little appears to have changed in the 30 years that bestselling author Peter May has been visiting the Isle of Lewis. But tourism has had a big impact – from Sunday opening hours to a deep water port for cruise ships

There was a joke doing the rounds when I was first visiting the Outer Hebrides more than three decades ago. On the flight to Stornoway, halfway across the Minch, the pilot makes an announcement: “We will shortly be arriving on the Isle of Lewis. Don’t forget to turn your watches back two … hundred years.”

And there was, indeed, as you arrived on the islands for the first time, a sense of stepping back in time – to a place and a culture that had changed little in perhaps centuries.