Scottish Roadtrip Day 6: Harris and Berneray

Berneray Beach

After another full breakfast, we set off to explore Uig beach, which we had been admiring from our window after since arriving at Auberge Carnish. As the tide was in there wasn’t much beach to explore but we did have a good walk along the white sand, before setting off for Leverburgh on Harris to catch our next ferry.

The first part of the route was retracing our steps from yesterday on the B8011, A858 and A859, then continuing down the A859 towards Tarbert, all great driving roads, perfect! Once we got to Harris the A859 got even better, climbing up the mountains, a smooth new section of road at the top, then a twisty descent down to Tarbert, where we stopped for a light lunch before continuing down the A859 to Leverburgh to catch our ferry. We were now driving along the west coast of Harris, with more beautiful white beaches, but we seemed to miss the 3m high MacLeod stone which we had been planning to visit of the way down, so ended up in Leverburgh about an hour early. The ferry to Berneray was a lot smaller than the Ullapool – Stornoway ferry, there wasn’t a dock, just a ramp into the sea that the ferry pulled up to and opened its ramp for the vehicles to drive off/on.

The crossing itself was interesting as the captain steered the ferry around various small islands before pulling up at another ramp into the sea at Berneray, which is the name of both the island and town (in the loosest sense of the term). To get to our B&B it was a case of following the single track road right until the end, then along a track and over a sheep field, even with the standard 4×4 suspension my MX-5 brushed its undercarriage on a few occasions.

For the second night running the view out of our window is a vast empty white beach (photo at the top of this post), returning to Perth with the view of KFC, a gym and the police station is going to be strange! Much like day 5, we ended the day by exploring the beach, followed by a three course dinner, I could get used to this!

Mileage so far: 835