I have no idea if the Loch Seaforth had a Deck 6 – I’m either too young or too old to remember – but the Loch Seaforth does. See, that’s what happens when you allow the general public to name your shiney new ship. They get all nostalgic and try to travel back in time: back to the days when you had to have your car hoisted onto the top deck for that midnight sailing to Kyle of Lochalsh and beyond.

I may have bored you in the past about my somewhat obsessive personal project photographing Stornoway from the top of Gallows Hill. I don’t really know how it started but every time I return to Lewis I humph a big tripod up the hill and shoot another set. Dates for visits to Stornoway have become dependant on the tide times table cross referenced with that for the ferry and the moon. A nice afternoon with a spring tide and the ferry at the pier is what I want. Then when it finally all comes together, so does the rain or some other reason making me want/need to do it all over again.

“They are part of our past, and should be preserved for our future.”

[The final sentence in architect Ruairidh Campbell Moir’s article for the Twentieth Century Society in which he worried for the future of the Arnish Point Gun Emplacements]

You’ll have seen them if you’ve come into Stornoway on the ferry: you’ll know every inch of them if you were ever a small boy growing up there. I wonder if ever again Primary 7 walked down town, through the Castle and across the moor to the lighthouse at Arnish Point. And then would the teachers allow half their charge to run off along the cliffs to climb the rusty ladder or wade about in the stagnant water around the Second World War defences? Its sad to see, a few years later, the look-out tower has started to crumble, it’s no longer possible to watch for enemy raiders coming over over the Minch, the concrete canopy has collapsed, eyes have been closed.