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Category : Caught By The River

15 Nov 2020

Post Offices of Lewis and Harris, past and present

LAST POST The recent demolition of the old Post Office in Ardhasaig has prompted me to look back at some of the other Post Offices I’ve photographed in Harris and Lewis. Anyone heading up or down the main A859 road just north of Tarbert will be familiar with this classic corrugated tin building. It’s been rusting for decades, taking on the colours of the landscape as it slowly deteriorated. There are still plenty of people on the island who remember […]

11 Dec 2019
Magic Phonebox

A Phone Call from the Outer Hebrides

Outer Hebrides’ K6 telephone boxes, in all their magical and modified glory. One of my first ever night photography subjects was the classic red telephone box above. It stands beside a former Post Office, overlooking Loch Finsbay on the east coast of the Isle of Harris. I later discovered many of the local residents referred to it as the ‘magic phone box’. In the mid 1990s, the phone next to Finsbay Post Office developed a fault. It didn’t prevent you […]

05 Oct 2018
Netty's Tree

Vote for Netty’s Tree!

The Woodland Trust have launched their annual search for 2018’s Tree of the Year. One of the contenders is a scraggly-looking spruce, which until recent years was the only tree on the tiny windswept Hebridean island of Eriskay (population: 150). Whisky Galore! Planted more than 100 years ago, Netty’s Tree was standing tall long before the island made the headlines in 1941, when 8,000 ton cargo ship the SS Politician sank off Eriskay’s north coast with 28,000 cases of whisky […]

17 Jun 2018
Welcome to Barra and Vatersay

Welcome to Barra and Vatersay

During 2017 I took my camera on several road trips, photographing buildings old and new for a multi-agency funded project entitled the ‘Western Isles Architectural Trail’. Over the next few months I’ll share some of the stories and photos from my travels. I’ll start at the southern end of the chain of islands that make up the Outer Hebrides. The Isle of Barra is probably best known for having the only airport in the world where scheduled flights use a […]

27 Jan 2018

Postcard from the Outer Hebrides #1

Towards the end of 2017 Caught by the River invited me to contribute a monthly post to their site. If you’re not familiar with CBTR, take some time to check them out – there’s a lot of great content over there. This is the first in my Postcard From The Outer Hebrides series. The article below was first published on Caught by the River on Jan 22nd, 2018. Their website’s experiencing a few gremlins at the moment. Several posts (including […]