Great Bernera sits in East Loch Roag, connected to Lewis by a single-track road and the first pre-stressed concrete bridge in Europe, built in 1953. The bridge is there because the islanders demanded it, and when the county council delayed year after year, they threatened to build it themselves.
The council eventually built it rather than be embarrassed by being beaten to it by crofters with their own materials. This is the first thing you learn about Great Bernera: that it is a place where people, when they need something, find a way to get it done.
The Island
Great Bernera is small enough to know in its entirety (you can walk its length in a morning) but substantial enough to have its own distinct character. Its landscape is the classic Lewis mix: open moorland in the interior, rocky coast all around, and the old croft ground on the lower slopes where the soil is dark and deep and has been worked for generations.
Croft 22 sits on the east side of the island, at Kirkibost, looking out over East Loch Roag. Behind it: the open moorland that covers most of the interior. In front: the water, the other islands, the Lewis mainland across the loch. In every direction, eventually, the sky.
The Light
The light on Great Bernera is unlike anything on the mainland. In summer, it lasts until eleven at night and begins again before four in the morning. In winter it retreats to a few hours of low, golden, almost horizontal illumination that makes everything it touches look like it is being lit for a painting. In between, it is variable in a way that means the same piece of ground looks like a different place in the morning and the afternoon and after the rain.
You don't get used to it. You become more alert to it.
Land & History
The Bernera Riot of 1874 is one of the defining events in the history of crofting rights in Scotland. When the estate factor tried to remove crofters from their common grazings, the people of Bernera resisted. Three men were arrested and charged, then acquitted, in a trial that drew attention across Scotland to the conditions that crofters were living under.
The Bernera Riot contributed directly to the Crofters' War of the 1880s and eventually to the Crofters' Holdings Act of 1886: the legislation that gave crofters security of tenure for the first time. The people of Great Bernera did not just hold on to their land. They helped change the law.
That history is present in the landscape. The stone walls that shelter the kitchen garden at CRØFT 22 were built by people who lived under those conditions. The croft ground itself has been worked, rested, and worked again for as long as people have lived here. We are the most recent in a long line of people who have tried to make something of this particular piece of ground.
CRØFT 22 is a registered croft. We are members of the Scottish Crofting Federation. We hold that lightly and take it seriously.
Community
This section is being written by Julia and Nat. It will carry the detail of community life on Great Bernera, the organisations and initiatives that make the island work, and CRØFT 22's place in it. Coming soon.