The men who survived the trenches and the Atlantic convoys and the long miserable winters of the Western Front were on the trains and the steamers home in December 1918, expected by mothers and wives and children. Many of them never arrived. The Lewis War Memorial tower on the hill above Stornoway holds two griefs in one stone. It commemorates the islanders who died in the Great War of 1914 to 1918. It also commemorates the men who survived all of that and then drowned within sight of home on the first day of 1919, when HMY Iolaire struck the rocks at the Beasts of Holm. The first public meeting to raise the memorial was held in January 1920, almost exactly a year after the Iolaire disaster. The grief was that fresh.
The memorial stands eighty-five feet high at the top of Cnoc nan Uan, the Hill of the Lambs, the highest point of Stornoway. Architect John Hinton Gall of Inverness designed it. It is built from local Lewisian gneiss, the dark grey banded rock that underlies the whole island and is some of the oldest exposed rock on the planet. The dressings are Aberdeenshire granite, paler and finer-grained, framing the doorways and the windows in cleaner lines than the rough gneiss alone could give. The entrance leads into a twenty-foot chamber. Four further chambers, one for each of the four parishes of Lewis, open from it. A metal-and-granite staircase climbs up through the tower to the turret at the top. From there, on a clear day, you can see most of the eastern half of the island, the harbour mouth where the Iolaire was lost, and the sea beyond.
The Hebrides sent men to the First World War in numbers out of all proportion to their population. Lewis alone contributed thousands to the Royal Navy, the Royal Naval Reserve, the Highland regiments. Almost every village lost men. The community that raised the funds for the tower was raising it for sons and brothers and fathers from nearly every family along the coast. The four parish chambers were not abstract divisions; they were the way islanders organized the dead so that families from Carloway and Barvas and Ness and Lochs could each find their own people among the names. The tower was completed in 1924. It has stood on the hill for a century now, its door painted poppy red since the most recent restoration.
Lewis weather is hard on stone. By 1975 the gneiss exterior and the internal wrought-iron staircase had deteriorated badly enough that the tower was closed to the public. Patching work in 1981 and 1982 held the worst of it at bay, but a full restoration waited until the second decade of the new century. In 2017 a £132,000 grant from the War Memorials Trust, the largest single award their programme had ever made, paid for new windows, a new roof, and breathable lime-and-sand mortar to replace the rigid cement render that had been trapping moisture inside the gneiss walls. The Trust also added a new feature: the main door was painted poppy red. Since then the tower has been open again, the staircase carrying visitors up to the turret, the four chambers below holding the names.
In November 2018, on the eve of the Iolaire centenary, the Woodland Trust planted 201 trees at Laxdale below the memorial: downy birch and wych elm and bird cherry and rowan and hazel. The saplings, hardy native species, were planted to form an avenue leading to the tower. Each tree represents one of the men who drowned. Walking up the avenue today, with the gneiss tower rising at the end and the sea behind it, is one of the quieter and more deliberate acts of remembrance any visitor can make on Lewis. The trees will outlive everyone reading this. The tower will outlive the trees.
The Lewis War Memorial stands at 58.22 degrees north, 6.40 degrees west, on the hill of Cnoc nan Uan just outside Stornoway. From the air the tower is visible from miles around as a tall narrow finger of dark stone on the highest ground above the town. Stornoway Airport (EGPO) is about two miles east; the memorial is easily picked up on approach. The harbour and the Beasts of Holm, the site of the Iolaire wreck, lie a couple of miles south, often visible from the same angle. The avenue of 201 trees planted in 2018 leads up to the tower from Laxdale; in summer the canopy is beginning to form, in winter the line of saplings is still clearly traceable from low altitude.