Back of Beyond - November 2006

Last weekend my daughter and I went to Uist, she to see her best friend in the whole world, and I to, among other things, hear 'Dods' Macfarlane's illustrated talk in Taigh Chearsabhagh, the arts centre in Lochmaddy. For those of you not in the know, Dods is the leader of the Nessmen, that crazy bunch of dudes who actually want to go every year to Sulasgeir, a small piece of rock 40 miles NW of the Butt of Lewis, there to spend a fortnight snaring gannets and getting incredibly smelly.

Hard to believe, it's true, but the photographic evidence was before our eyes, in the form of Dods' amazing slides, covering 40 years of guga hunting; huge brawny men teetering on ridiculously tiny ledges on cliffs hundreds of feet above the boiling sea, with no more protective gear than a boiler suit and a piece of old rope tied round their middles. A few slides later the same huge brawny men huddled around a Leach's petrel chick, hand feeding it and anxiously awaiting the return of its parent. The aforementioned boiler suits were seen to get increasingly filthy as guga were caught, decapitated, plucked, singed and salted. Oh you don't change them, said Dods cheerfully, whats the point in that? Must be fun being the wife of a Nessman.

As the evening drew to a close, and Dods showed the final slides of huge queues around the harbour at Port of Ness, someone asked how much a guga cost. Dods and his pal looked at each other. £10, he said finally, but a lot more if you're Gordon Ramsay. I hope you've negotiated a wholesale price for the Fank, Calumannabel, or it'll be the hedgehog pie for us.

I don't know how many of you watched the BBC's Autumnwatch programme, but if you did, you might be interested in these pictures of the Monachs.