Winter in the Outer Hebrides seems to conjure two words in peoples minds – both of which seem to make us slightly odd to have come here in winter in most southerners minds. The first is dark, because surely this far north it will get light so much later and dark so much earlier. Oddly, it gets dark later than it does in say London, but I have to admit that it gets light about an hour later. This is because sunrise advances from SE to NW at this time of year so it is much later, but sunset comes rather more from a rather less oblique angle. And it actually starts to get light, technically the twilight hours, before and after sunrise/sunset much earlier/later than you would expect, so in the morning and afternoon you can get the most amazing sunrises and sunsets. The reason for all of this is that the sun is moving at a much more oblique angle to the horizon as it crawls over the horizon and heads for the heights at midday. I am sure there is a complicated way of working out how high it actually gets, but all I know is that in some complicated way our latitude 57.5 degrees north decimal and the tilt of the earth to the sun means that at this time of year it struggles up to get higher than about twenty degrees above the horizon, which gives very oblique and thus very weak sunshine.

Logically, weak sunshine can mean only one thing – cold. That would be true if we didn’t have the largest heat store on the planet running past the front door and in this case it really is nearly our front door. The North Atlantic Drift is a huge mass of water driven by the trade winds on the equator. It is in fact hardly imaginable how much water it contains – 150 million cubic metres are moved north every second. The movement north also means that water warmed in the Equator and the Caribbean comes north to flow past the Outer Hebrides. The result is that whilst London is currently 8 degrees celcius, we are currently in a balmy 10 degrees and all talk of freezing temperatures is only relevant to the south and east. But all this does depend on the wind direction, so last week when a huge northerly gale blew in from the Arctic all bets were off and we were treated to some magnificent hail storms that gave the Harris Hills impressive white tops. So we hope the wind continues to blow over the radiator to the west.

The temperate weather goes some way to explain the extraordinary richness of archaeological remains in the area, although the climate was much warmer up until about 5000 years ago (and the sea level about 30 metres lower meaning there is a whole lot of archaeology under the sea). What is left is amazing, but the most amazing is the Callanish Stones in Lewis. It is a huge set of stones, made from the local stone whose formation predates its use by man by over 3000 million years and thus makes it some of the oldest rock on the planet. As with many such stone circles, it is aligned with both the summer and winter solstices, some moon rises, as well as being aligned to a time when the sun runs down the outline of a reclining body of a woman traced by the hills of Harris. Were the ancients hoping to forecast the arrival of snow on the hills, or plant their seeds in the spring, or many of a huge variety of other events that are seasonal. We will never know, but I think they were hoping to predict the arrival of the greatest run of migratory fish in the islands. Nowadays these are important to two of the best salmon fisheries on the island, which are literally next door to each other. Both are fed by a run of salmon that has to negotiate the same narrows at the foot of the stones.

See, everything comes back to fishing.