After three days of being battered by westerlies and trudging across wind-scoured machair, dunes, and silvery beaches, we decided we had earned a change. The wind was easing, so we chose to climb a hill.
Not just any hill, either. Eabhal is the highest point on North Uist, a towering 347 metres above sea level — Uist’s Matterhorn, perhaps that is too ambitious, but at least it stands alone.
Almost entirely ringed by water, Eabhal normally involves a slow, soggy march around Loch Obarsaraigh. Fortunately, the bogs had dried, making the ascent less of a slog.
The view from the top is worth the effort. It lays bare North Uist’s reality: a thin fertile strip clinging to the west, and behind it, a drowned landscape of peat and water. There is more water than bog, more bog than terra firma. It is hard to tell where the land ends and the lochs begin.
Somewhere out there lies Loch Sgadabhagh, the most intricate and absurd of them all. It is barely four square kilometres in area, yet its shoreline is 75 kilometres long. Someone counted 175 islands in it on the 1:10,000 Ordnance Survey map. Others say there are over 300. Either way, it is not short on corners.
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