The most striking remains at Howmore are of Teampull Mor - the Large Church, also called St Mary's - of which only part of the east gable still stands. The building probably dates to the thirteenth century and served as the parish church of South Uist. The ruins are supposed to have once housed a 'College of Learning,' which would have made Howmore a centre of Gaelic literacy and Christian scholarship in the medieval Hebrides. At least one ancestor of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair - the eighteenth-century Gaelic national poet who wrote Birlinn of Clanranald, one of the masterpieces of the language - lies buried there. So, by family tradition, does an ancestor of his cousin, the famous Flora MacDonald, whose own birthplace cairn stands eleven kilometres south at Milton.

At the Reformation, Howmore did something unusual: it turned Protestant, while 95 percent of South Uist remained Catholic. The Macdonalds had shielded the old faith on the rest of the island, but Howmore - perhaps because of the lingering authority of the medieval parish - went the other way. The church built here in 1858 reflects that history. It is one of the very few churches in Scotland with a central Communion table, an arrangement that recalls older Presbyterian practice where worshippers gathered around the table rather than facing a distant altar. White-harled and small, it served the surrounding crofts and the fishing fleets off the west coast at the same time, doubling as a navigation mark for boats coming in from the Atlantic.

Howmore is also home to one of the largest collections of thatched buildings left in Scotland - the traditional taigh dubh or blackhouse, low and dry-stone-walled with rounded thatch held down against the wind. One of them is a youth hostel, run by the Gatliff Hebridean Hostels Trust, which keeps a network of these buildings open across the Outer Hebrides as a way of preserving both the architecture and the experience of travelling slow along the islands. From the hostel windows you look east across the medieval ruins toward Hecla, 606 metres high, the second-highest peak on South Uist. A hill walker who sets out from this door can take in Hecla, Ben Corodale, and Beinn Mhor - the island's three highest summits - in a long, boggy, rewarding day.

Three kilometres north of Howmore lies Loch Druidibeg, an important breeding ground for greylag geese and one of the last British strongholds of the corncrake, a small brown rail whose harsh nocturnal call once carried across every hayfield in Europe but which has retreated to a handful of crofted islands in the west. Oral tradition holds that South Uist was once heavily wooded until the Vikings arrived and cleared the forests, though the actual cause of the deforestation is disputed by modern scholars. What survives of the old woodland is a small patch called Allt Volagir on the southern slopes of Beinn Mhor, one of the few stands of natural trees left in the Hebrides. From most of Howmore you cannot see a single tree - the wind has not allowed it - but a kilometre south, in a sheltered cleft, the original landscape briefly reappears.