Rodel

The road to Rodel runs along the east coast of South Harris through a landscape of lunar austerity — bare gneiss, black lochans, the occasional house standing alone in the rock without apparent reason. The Golden Road, as it’s called, winds through this with the energy of a path made by someone who had to go around every obstacle rather than through any of them, and the drive takes twice as long as the distance suggests. I arrived at Rodel in early afternoon, the light from the south catching the tower of St Clement’s Church from a kilometre before the village arrived.

The church is fifteenth century, built by the MacLeod chiefs of Dunvegan as a family mausoleum, and it is — there’s no other way to put this — completely anomalous. Nothing else in the Outer Hebrides prepares you for it. The architecture is ambitious: a cruciform plan with a square tower, carved stone details on the exterior including a Sheila-na-Gig that the information board mentions with what reads like studied diplomatic neutrality. Inside, the light comes through small windows onto the flagged floor and the tombs, and the silence is of the particular quality that stone and time and not many visitors creates.

The tomb of Alasdair Crotach MacLeod, built before his death in 1528, is the thing that stops you. It’s not large — it fits in an arched recess in the south wall — but the carving is extraordinary: a recumbent effigy of the chief above, the walls of the recess carved with scenes from the Bible, saints, hunting scenes, heraldic details, apostles. Someone spent years on this, somewhere in Scotland, and it ended up at the southern tip of Harris in a small church that most people have never heard of. I stood in front of it for perhaps twenty minutes trying to read all the narrative panels before the light shifted and I lost them.

Outside, the churchyard runs to the edge of the sea-loch on two sides, and the gravestones face in various directions with the democratic disorder of centuries of use. The hills behind are bare and close. The loch in front runs south to open sea. A small hotel occupies the old harbour building and does reasonable bar food; I ate a bowl of lentil soup with bread and butter and sat with the window view over the loch until the cloud came in from the west and the light went flat. The afternoon was complete in a way that few afternoons manage.

When to go: St Clement’s is open year-round and the lack of crowds at Rodel makes any season reasonable. The drive along the Golden Road is best in summer daylight when the light on the gneiss and lochan landscape can be absorbed slowly. In autumn the colours go amber and ochre across the moorland and the drive south from Tarbert becomes something worth planning an entire day around.