Carloway

I first saw Dun Carloway from the road, which is how you’re supposed to see it — the broch appearing on its rocky knoll above the loch with a suddenness that makes you brake. I’d passed it twice the previous day, both times meaning to stop, and the third time I pulled into the layby and walked up the path through heather with the wind pushing in from the Atlantic and the light going low and orange over the loch below. The broch is thirteen metres high on one side, the outer wall still standing almost to its original height for half the circumference, the other half opened by millennia of slow collapse and at least one deliberate dismantling in the seventeenth century for building stone. What remains is enough to understand what was there.

Brochs are unique to Scotland and the islands — Iron Age towers, dry-stone built, hollow-walled with internal galleries, thought to have served as defended farmsteads or status symbols or both. Dun Carloway is one of the best preserved anywhere on the islands. You can walk through the entrance passage, still lintelled, and stand inside the base where the internal wall structure is visible in cross-section: the double wall with the void between, the galleries accessible through low doorways. The space inside the base is perhaps eight metres across. Standing there with the sky as the ceiling and the structure enclosing you on all sides, I had the specific vertigo of trying to think in Iron Age categories and failing entirely.

The village of Carloway itself is a few minutes south — a scattering of houses along the loch shore with a community that has been here, in various configurations, since before the broch was built. The Carloway Tweed company weaves Harris Tweed in a workshop behind the main road and sells direct; the fabric tends toward the earth tones and heather colours that suit the landscape around it, and the price is what you’d pay at any honest workshop. I bought a length of herringbone in grey-green that now sits on a shelf in my Mexico apartment and makes everything else on that shelf look provisional.

The walk above the broch onto the moorland takes you into the Lewis peat landscape at its most undisturbed — dark, spongy, trackless in places, with the smell of wet earth and sphagnum moss that is unlike any other smell in the world. A few hundred metres of this, looking back at the broch from above with the loch below and the Atlantic glinting at the moor’s edge, and you understand why someone chose this specific knoll two thousand years ago for a tower. The position is everything: visible from the sea, commanding the loch, with high ground behind.

When to go: Carloway and the broch are accessible year-round and the path is well maintained. Summer evenings, when the low Atlantic sun angles across the loch and hits the broch from the west, produce the best light for the stones. September brings the moorland to an amber colour that makes the walk above the broch worth the wet boots. Go as late in the day as you can manage.