Stornoway

The Crit and the quiet Sunday

The Criterion Bar on Point Street is one room, with a curved bar counter, a gantry mostly dating from the 1930s, 1930s dado panelling and fixed seating that may date from the same period. Its historic interior is the only one of its kind in a Western Isles pub or hotel, and it remains one of the few places in Stornoway where you can still have a good yarn in Gaelic. The toilets were modernised around 2000; nothing else has been in a hurry. Caley 80 comes off the draught, a band called the Critters plays Irish music assembled from whoever turns up, and the bar follows the town's Sunday Sabbath. Much of the town does.

Stornoway keeps a strict Sabbath, the mark of a Presbyterian town with both a Church of Scotland and a Free Church presence, and Martin's Memorial Church puts a Victorian spire over Francis Street to prove it. The town's quieter Sunday gives the working harbour a different pace.

Cask ale, live music and castle woodland

For a proper cask ale you go to the Crown Hotel on Castle Street, the only place in town that serves one and is annually Cask Marque-accredited. It also has more than 120 gins and runs a harbour-view restaurant and lounge with food service. The hotel once sold a cherry brandy to a fourteen-year-old Prince Charles on a Gordonstoun excursion. MacNeils, in the centre, is the place for spontaneous ceilidhs and live music. An Lanntair, the arts centre on Kenneth Street, has a café bar and restaurant looking over the harbour, plus a gallery, cinema and a 200-seat auditorium that hosts the Hebridean Celtic Festival.

Across the inner harbour, Lews Castle sits on a wooded hill that has no business being there. Lewis is peat moor and lochs, treeless for miles, and the woodland around the castle was planted from the 1850s on imported soil by Sir James Matheson, who bought the whole island in 1844 with a fortune made in the China trade. The grounds are the walk to take: riverside and woodland paths, play areas, harbour views back to the fishing fleet, enough green for a week. The restored castle holds Museum nan Eilean, where six of the Lewis Chessmen — twelfth-century Norse pieces carved from walrus ivory, found in the sand at Uig — are on display.

The community-owned estate

The town owns its own estate. In 1923 Lord Leverhulme, the soap magnate whose redevelopment plans had run out of road, gave the parish of Stornoway and some 64,000 acres to its people, founding the Stornoway Trust, one of the oldest community-owned estates in Scotland.

Ferry, flights and the road west

The ferry to Ullapool takes about two and a half hours; the airport, ten minutes out, flies to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Inverness. West of town the Calanais standing stones predate Stonehenge.

The Iolaire at the harbour mouth

At the harbour mouth, on the Beasts of Holm rocks, a memorial marks the Iolaire, which sank on New Year's morning in 1919 and drowned around 205 island men coming home from the war. The water they were an hour from is the same water the fishing boats still work.