Stornoway is the only place on Lewis with a supermarket, the only place with stand-alone bars, the only place with a hospital, and the obvious base for everything else. Its sheltered harbour has been a refuge for ships for as long as there have been ships in these waters. The ferry to Ullapool on the mainland runs in two and a half hours; the airport, two miles east of town, sends Loganair flights to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness, and Benbecula. Five bus routes radiate from Stornoway: north toward Ness and the Butt of Lewis, west across the moor toward Callanish and Carloway, deep into the western corner toward Uig, out east to the Eye Peninsula, and south across the hills into Harris. None of them run on Sunday. Outside Stornoway, the petrol stations close, the shops close, and for many people the island returns to the older Sabbath rhythm in which everything stops.

On the west coast at Callanish, thirteen meters of grey gneiss rise out of the moor in patterns laid down nearly five thousand years ago. The main circle and its associated lines of stones predate Stonehenge, and they remain in some ways more mysterious because no one ever wrote down what they were for. Lunar astronomy is one of the leading guesses. Less than three miles south, Callanish II and III are smaller circles that peat-cutters revealed an earlier wooden circle beneath. The Carloway Broch nearby is a defensive stone tower from the Iron Age, walls still standing nine meters high. At Gearrannan, a row of restored blackhouses shows how Lewis crofters lived until well into the twentieth century: thick double walls of stone packed with peat, a thatched roof anchored against the Atlantic, a single hearth at one end, the cattle once kept at the other. Walk into one and you understand why the islanders sometimes called these buildings tigh-dubh, the black houses.

Through the nineteenth century the Highland Clearances and a series of famines emptied huge stretches of Lewis. Landowners turned the cleared ground over to sheep, to deer stalking, and to grouse moors. The crofters who remained were forced onto cramped, infertile patches near the coast. By the 1880s, with the wider Highland economy in slump, they had reached the end of their patience. In 1888 the farm of Coll, north of Stornoway, was seized by land raiders. In 1887 a mob had invaded the Pairc deer forest in the south of the island and slaughtered deer at a camp canteen in a week-long act of protest. Juries in Edinburgh refused to convict the ringleaders. After the First World War, when returning soldiers had been promised a land fit for heroes, Lord Leverhulme, the soap tycoon who had bought the whole of Lewis in 1917, opposed land resettlement on principle. He wanted to industrialise the island. Raids resumed at Tong, Coll, and Gress in 1919 and again in 1920 and 1921. The government finally invoked compulsory powers, and Leverhulme conceded. By the time he died in 1925 his Hebridean ventures were collapsing. The crofters had won the land; the island had not won prosperity. The Bridge to Nowhere at Garry Bridge, built to extend the road to Ness and then abandoned half a mile later, is the perfect monument to Leverhulme's unfinished plans.

Around sixty percent of islanders still speak Gaelic; road signs put Gaelic first, English second and smaller. The Sabbath is taken more seriously here than almost anywhere else in Britain. Until very recently the Sunday ferry was banned. The Lewis chessmen, walrus-ivory pieces carved in twelfth-century Norway and found in a sandbank near Uig in 1831, are mostly in the British Museum now, with eleven kept at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The Butt of Lewis lighthouse at the very northern tip, built in red brick by David Stevenson in 1862, stands above cliffs that are dramatic and crumbling and best not walked on a windy day. The Tiumpan Head light out on the Eye Peninsula was sounded by a seven-year-old Prince Charles in 1956 when its new foghorn was installed. The wind is the constant: it shapes the trees, what few there are, and it shapes the people. Lewis is a place that asks you to dress for it, and once you are dressed for it, it lets you stay.