Stone me ... Garenin hostel on Lewis
Pity the poor youth hostel. Established in the days when being young was synonymous with being hard up, what place do these cradles of healthy outdoor living have in an age where young people burn cash for fun and take six holidays abroad a year in accommodation as far removed from a bunkhouse as Clitheroe is from Klosters? It's little wonder that with a declining clientele the Youth Hostel Association has reinvented itself, poshed up, and gone all family friendly.
Three cheers, then, for the trend-bucking Gatliff Hebridean Hostels Trust and its quartet of no-frills crofters' cottages. The late Herbert Gatliff's philosophy, unchanged since he set up the organisation in 1961, is that hostels should be simple places where you can "cook a meal, dry clothes and enjoy the company of like-minded travellers". And it's a formula that still works: visitor numbers at the Gatliff hostels are up 50% since 2000.
Forming a chain from Lewis to South Uist, the rustic bunkhouses aim to provide stopping-off points every 40 miles or so for those wishing to explore the islands of north-west Scotland.
Travelling the islands is a simple affair nowadays, because what God has put asunder, man has largely joined together by a series of causeways. I set off from the south on my bicycle, coming first to Howmore, a hostel cowering beneath South Uist's two highest mountains and overlooking an ancient graveyard in which are strewn various mouldering chiefs of Clan Ranald. I talk with German-born Gaelophile Axel - something of a legend in these parts - whose mobile has a ringtone of himself singing a jaunty Gaelic-language reel about porridge. I know this because his phone goes off in the bunk below mine at seven the next morning. And then again at 10 past.
This is less riotously amusing than it might sound since I had not long gone to bed, having put the world to rights over copious cups of Rooibos tea prepared by Maggie, a Green Party councillor and "environmental philosopher" who has strong views about the islands' hedgehog eradication programme (they are considered pests because they eat the eggs of ground-nesting birds). The only hedgehog I see the next day on my way to Berneray has been squashed by a car, which seems an unscientific way of going about the business of eradication.
Berneray is a droplet of an island - just three miles by two - and its thatched stone hostel, which practically tumbles on to the beach, is as romantic as the hostellers at Howmore had promised. A few years ago a friend of mine met a Frenchman here and ended up marrying him. Tonight, however, I'm too weary to look for love at the local ceilidh so I stay in and chat to Kat, a young medical student, who regales me with tales of growing up in rural Cheshire as the only gay in the village.
Before I came to the Western Isles, I wondered whether, as a default-setting introvert, I would fit in with the "hostelling crowd". But after two nights it becomes apparent that there is really no such thing and that all human life is here (and some nights all nationalities, too). Hostels do seem to attract an above average number of larger-than-life characters, but no one frets if you just want to curl up in a corner with a book - though it is viewed as rather bad form to curl up with a DVD player.
On the subject of technology, it's a sobering thought that if you had visited the pretty coastal hamlet of Rhenigidale on Harris before 1980, you would have arrived before the national grid. Furthermore, you would have been obliged to walk or sail in because it wasn't until 1989 that the EU kindly built the residents a road. Even today, it feels like the village at the end of the world. I arrive as the rain is stottin' doon, and the smoke from the hostel chimney is a welcome sight.
Better still, Susan and Fiona, two charming young women from Edinburgh, take pity on my wretched state ("poor wee bedraggled thing" were, I believe, their words) and give me some of their delicious vegetable chilli, ply me with wine and cheer me up with stories about Malawi and probiotics. This is not the sort of thing that happens when you check into a hotel.
Over dinner, I ask them what there is to do in the Outer Hebrides. They say they are happy walking, looking at the sea and watching the wildlife (seals, otters and birds). If that sounds too mellow, the highlights to visit between hostels are the 2,000-year-old Dun Carloway tower, the prehistoric Standing Stones of Callanish, the hills of North Harris, the vast sandy beaches of western Harris, Flora MacDonald's birthplace, Ormiclate Castle, and, for location-baggers, Taransay, setting for the BBC's Castaway in 2000.
My last stop is in the west of Lewis at Garenin, Gatliff's northernmost outpost and a must for the would-be time traveller. The building is one of a village of restored traditional black houses (actually thatched houses painted brilliant white) that together form a living museum. The beach below faces west and when evening comes everyone piles out to watch the sun plop daintily into the sea.
So, if it's so idyllic, why aren't we all doing it? Well, at £9 per night (£6 for under-18s), there are some drawbacks to hostel living. The one shower and two toilets can be busy in the mornings, and not everyone is overjoyed at the prospect of mixed-sex bunk-bedded dorms. At times there's also what might be termed an understated attitude to issues of health and safety. Oh, and you can't book - though "you are unlikely to be turned away" (there are emergency mattresses for when space is tight).
But these minor discomforts should be set against the extraordinary sense of camaraderie; the countless instances of small kindnesses; and the fact that every night each hostel turns into an impromptu bar, with people cracking open bottles of wine or whisky or, more often than not, simply brewing up and settling down to the lost art of conversation (or, if Axel is around, the nearly lost art of Gaelic folk singing). The hostel is dead. Long live the hostel.
