On a good day there can be no finer view than that from the Applecross peninsula across the Inner Sound to Raasay and the Cuillins; on the other 350-odd days a year there is no view at all. Here, during the savage storm that hit the Hebrides in January last year, the winds were clocked at 164 miles an hour; here, there might be as much as 100 inches of rainfall in a year, or five times as much as some parts of the country; here, during the winters, the mean daily sunshine falls from its pitiful summer average of five hours to a grimly Stygian one. Welcome to Calum MacLeod Country, to a land of peat bogs and bare outcrops, of wet and sleet and wind — 20 per cent of the year there are gale force winds — of the midge, Sabbatarian observance, recreational knitting and the inescapable historical baggage of the Highland Clearances.

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