Isle of Lewis

This is Spain's state-owned shipbuilding company, and last year they acquired Harland & Wolff, which had fallen into administration in 2024.

That acquisition included all four of Harland and Wolfe's yards, Belfast, Appledore, Methill and Fyvan Arnish on the Isle of Lewis.

It protected more than a thousand jobs and ensured the continuation of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary's Fleet Solid Support Ship Programme.

We don't have time to go into it today, but it's important at least to know that although Novantia was created in 2005, it traces its roots back more than 300 years to the Royal shipyards established for the Spanish Navy.

You are listening to The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World.

20 miles off the far northwest coast of Scotland, out past the Isle of Lewis, where the Atlantic has nothing left to break it, there is a scatter of black rocks called the Flannan Isles.

Barely islands at all, just the bare bones of the earth sticking up out of one of the wildest seas on the planet.

No trees, no shelter, nothing but rock and gulls and weather.

Tell the good folk in the podcast who you are and where you work.

Well, my main role is I'm minister of Carloway Free Church on the Isle of Lewis, which is where I'm from, a small rural community right on the Atlantic coast.

And it's a beautiful place to live and a wonderful church to serve.

Very, very rural in many ways, but a place where we're very happy.

I think as well that one of the things that's happening so quickly and that the church needs to recognize, and I see this in Lewis, is just how rapidly one generation as one generation goes to the next, the departure from the church becomes so quick.

So you can go from great-grandfather who was minister or elder to great-grandchild who's completely unchurched.

And that's an astonishingly rapid shift that I'm seeing before my eyes in the Isle of Lewis.

Going on to talk about the idea of community, again, you know, traditionally there was a nuclear community, it was geographical, folk knew one another, you know, from generations, you know, even the Scottish name, MacLeod, MacDonald, the son, you know, it was in the culture.

Uh, the main purpose of my trip was to speak Scottish Gaelic in the wild.

Um, I've been at, studying at a college in recent years on the Isle of Skye, but I was on the Isle of Eriskay, on the southern part of the Other- Outer Hebrides, and on a farm, a small croft on the Isle of Lewis.

So that was what I was doing most of the time.

I also spent two days at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which everyone must go to if they haven't.

It's a little bit nicer in the world, wherever you are.

Although, Mr356boy, it's a wild Isle of Lewis, 50-mile winds and rain.

Yeah, not too different here for a bit of sun.

But that looks long gone.

The Flannan Isles is otherwise known as Seven Hunters.

It's a small uninhabited archipelago located in the North Atlantic Ocean, about 20 miles northwest of Gallon Head on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland.

They're largest in the series of these isolated rocks, Eilean Moor.

The winds do not pass over these islands.

And it lit this flame across Scotland of a spiritual awakening in the eighteenth century.

Or we could think more recently of the times on the Isle of Lewis, um, moments particularly in the early fifties to, uh, early nineteen fifties when there was this revival and young people suddenly struck by great fear for, uh, wanting to be made right with God and receiving Jesus and transforming the whole island.

And we can think to ourselves, "Well, would that really happen where we live now? The culture's changed.

People have moved on." And this chapter reassures us we're not to think like that, that God's power is confined to a particular era.

In the morning we'd expect to sail to Barra, get excited about stepping for the first time onto the Outer Hebrides and explore the island.

The following day we'd continue north, island hopping until we reached the Isle of Lewis, the furthest point north of the Outer Hebridean Islands.

Each stage depended upon the one before it.

Now, the first link in the chain had been broken.