Daliburgh sits where the A865, the road that runs the length of South Uist, meets the B888 turning south toward Pollachar and the Eriskay causeway. It is the second-largest township on the island, and that is a relative claim - the Co-op supermarket, the Borrodale Hotel, the post office, Burnside Fish and Chips, and a filling station are clustered along a few hundred yards of road. To the west the machair runs to the beach. To the east, the boggy brown hills rise toward Beinn Mhor. The whole township was granted as a tack - a kind of lease - to Ranald Macdonald in 1730 by the chief of Clanranald, and the land has changed hands many times since, but the shape of the crofts, narrow strips running back from the road, follows lines that would still be recognisable to a Macdonald three hundred years ago.

In 1894 the Sacred Heart hospital opened in Daliburgh, paid for by the philanthropist John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute. The money came at the request of two South Uist priests - Fr Allan MacDonald of St Peter's in Daliburgh, the Gaelic poet who later moved to Eriskay to build St Michael's, and Fr John Mackintosh of Bornish, known locally as 'The Big Priest of the Horses.' They were the figures who held a Catholic island together through the late nineteenth century, when London and Edinburgh were still indifferent at best. The hospital closed in 2000, replaced by a new facility on Benbecula, and the old building became Taigh a' Chridhe Uile Naomh, a care home heated by ground-source pumps and three small wind turbines. The walls are the same.

Next to the Borrodale Hotel stands a memorial to Domhnall Ailean Domhnallach - Donald Allan MacDonald in English - a Gaelic bard who lived in Daliburgh through the middle of the twentieth century. He was one of the last major poets to compose in the South Uist tradition, working in metres that go back to the bardic schools, writing for an audience that still listened in their own language. The memorial is plain. The verse on it is not. Walk past it on a summer evening when the Ceolas school is in session and you may hear someone reciting his lines a hundred yards away, in the language he chose to keep alive against considerable odds.

At the main junction stands the Church of Scotland, a substantial nineteenth-century stone building with attached hall and manse. A short walk west, in the township of Cille Pheadair, is the Roman Catholic Church of St Peter, with a public hall opposite that hosts ceilidhs, dances, and the kind of community functions that anchor an island. South Uist was largely spared the Reformation - the Macdonalds protected the old faith here, and the population remains predominantly Catholic - so the two buildings represent not a divided community but the geological layering of Scottish religious history. The Co-op sits between them. On a Sunday afternoon, when most of the Western Isles is shut tight, you can still buy a pint of milk on South Uist. Catholicism, it turns out, is more accommodating on the question of Sabbath retail.