That Thursday morning we had a breakfast of muesli and kippers, checked out, and drove away, not actually ‘without a backward glance’, because I stopped for this photo.

The 20 miles back down to Stornoway only took us half an hour and as check-in at the ferry terminal was at 1pm we had lots of time.

As ever, the first thing to do before we could relax was get the car plugged into a charger. We had driven 100 miles since we topped up the day before and wanted to arrive on the mainland with a full battery ready for the drive south the next morning. So we made our way back to the same Chargepoint Scotland installation we had used before – in the big, free car park half a mile east of the town centre. We again found both the main units free, which was lucky because the middle one hadn’t worked last time, but again the other one started charging straight away. As you see from the photo, there was a white Renault Zoe on the smaller unit at the end – a car with a much smaller range which we could only think must have been a local.

As we started into town Lesley had another of her clever ideas. We had a vague memory that the nice people from Hebridean Hopscotch, our tour organiser, were based somewhere near here, and sure enough, when we looked it up we found the office was only a couple of hundred yards down the road. So we called in as we went past to introduce ourselves and give them some feedback on the trip and the places we’d stayed. i.e. the two B&Bs way out in front, followed by the hotels in reverse order of star-rating. It became apparent that it was still quite unusual for someone to attempt the trip in an electric car, possibly even a first for them, and the agent, with her lovely Hebridean accent, seemed relieved that we had had no significant trouble.

We then had time to kill in the town, so we had coffee in a quirky coffee shop and watched a couple of lads busking on their bagpipes.

Ferry loading, as ever, was straightforward and we left the car on the car deck to find comfortable seats for the crossing.

It was a modern, well-appointed ship and the observation lounge was hushed and comfortable, with just the right amount of gentle motion from the waves. Only half the length of the Oban-Castlebay crossing, the hour and forty minutes passed very easily.

Now having completed our Hebridean Hopscotch itinerary, we had booked this night via Booking.com at Harbour House, a large, modern B&B just up the road from the Ullapool ferry terminal, where we, along with a number of other car-loads off the boat, were greeted with a convivial dram of Scotch.

It was a lovely, sunny evening as we walked the half mile to the seafront for supper at the Ferry Boat Inn, We had only come a short distance south on the ferry but noticed a completely different feel to the place from Lewis, partly because of the vastly improved weather no doubt, but in spite of road works all along the seafront front it struck us as a much brighter and greener place than the greyness of Stornoway.

It was a four hour drive from Ullapool to Glasgow, and as we bypassed Inverness and went on through Aviemore the road became gradually larger and busier.

We had thought we would break the journey and try out one of the numerous Chargepoint Scotland stations indicated in and around Perth and Stirling. But actually when we looked at the detail on the app only some them were the CCS kind we needed and those seemed to be well off the route and in places like multi-story car parks. So when the navigation system showed us that we had enough charge to get to a Tesla supercharger we took the easy way out and told it to take us there.

Which it did, automatically starting the process of conditioning the battery for supercharging (heating it, we think) when we were about twenty minutes out. Very cool.

The Motherwell installation, near Glasgow, turned out to be situated on land owned by the Dakota Eurocentral Hotel, a grand establishment indeed. Signs by every pump warned you to go inside and enter the car’s registration, or pay a large penalty fee. All rather odd – but obviously the deal. So in we went to the dimly-lit and rather pretentious interior and sat for a while eating expensive sandwiches with their crusts trimmed off and drinking expensive lime and soda.

Never was it more apparent that Tesla ownership gives you membership of an exclusive and privileged club, which is fine for us, but hardly a model for EV charging infrastructure in general. For us it was something of a guilty relief after negotiating public chargers, even in relatively-enlightened Scotland, to get back to the confidence-inspiring simplicity of just backing up, opening the charge-point flap, plugging in, and walking away. Leaving the car to draw its 125kW or so, instead of the 35kW or so we had become used to – but that was only one, and perhaps the least, of the advantages.

After that we drove on along the motorway through lowland Scotland towards Carlisle and the border. A beautiful drive on a spacious road with widely separated carriageways, which follows the route I had several times travelled by rail. During these long stages we entertained ourselves by listening to all nine hours of Jim Broadbent reading Rachel Fry’s delightful The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which suited us perfectly.

The M6 through the hills or northern England is one of our favourite roads and we stopped for the night near its highest point with the Lake District on the horizon, at the isolated Shap Wells hotel, again booked, this time at short notice, through Booking.com.

It was a large, elegant, traditional hotel set in beautiful countryside with its own wooded glen alive with waterfalls and red squirrels. We loved it and its friendly staff.

Stopping to top up a final time at Keele services superchargers, the next morning, we found ourselves diverted down the M5 because of an accident on the M40. And so came home by an unfamiliar but very beautiful route through the Cotswold Hills.

It had been a fabulous trip.

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The EV experience.

Our experience is that the car doesn’t go as far as it says it will. Although the nominal range is 330 miles, in practice we looked for chargers at least every 250. Our experience of the Tesla network had given us great confidence, but were much more cautious when we were using public chargers because we weren’t sure they would work

This certainly applied while we were on the Islands where we tried to keep the battery close to half full. Which meant finding a charger every other day. And there is no denying that this became a background preoccupation. I have no doubt, however, that others would be more courageous than we were.

Scotland’s national public charging network, Chargeplace Scotland, with 1,000 units and counting. This is far more advanced than the jungle of competing networks in England. It has a unified payment system (Hallelujah!) either via the app, via the website, or using a contactless card. We had sent for the card in advance of our trip and set up linking to a credit card.

So – the Chargeplace Scotland app shows what looks like an ample provision on the Islands – three, for a start, on Barra where we arrived, two of them in Castlebay itself and one of those outside the council offices, literally across the road from our hotel.

It sounded great, and we had come all the way from Abington services south of Glasgow expecting it would be easy. But as I described in the blog, I couldn’t make that unit work and had to go down to the quay and plug in to the more modern-looking one there. Which worked fine, very much to my relief.

And that turned out to be the pattern. There were two kinds of unit, a smaller one – which I never got to work – with a minimalist display and requiring your own connecting cable, and a bigger one in a blue livery with its own cables, often sited at a ferry terminal, which did work, sometimes after one or two false starts. The latter kind delivered around 35kW and topped the car up in about an hour – coffee or walk-around. Twice we found the units occupied, but we got round that by coming back later.

One point seems almost too obvious to mention, but is actually important: unlike a conventional filling station, these installations are always unmanned. And there is never anybody around who understands them. To be fair, there is an emergency help line, and if we had tried that we might feel differently.

The bottom line is that we never actually had a serious worry about charging, but it was sometimes frustrating. Even in more-enlightened Scotland we basically haven’t got it right yet if this is to be the future.

In every other respect driving the the Tesla was an absolute dream. It is incredibly comfortable, quiet and smooth. The effortless power wafted us up the steepest of slopes without the car showing the slightest sign of noticing the difference. Light years away from the changing of gears and the revving of engines.

The large central information screen constantly provided a wealth of information, including a zoomable satellite rendering of the country we were travelling through, with points of interest highlighted and labelled.

Compared with driving our old diesel Skoda – by previous standards a refined and sophisticated car – it feels like a quantum leap forward.

Bottom line – cost…

Here is a schedule of the chrging charges we incured. Curiously, the full top-up in Castlebay, after we arrived on the islands, never appeared on the Chargeplace Scotland account at all. And the one we had at Tarbert Ferry Terminal (in the rain) wasn’t billed! We certainly had both.

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Tuesday 16th – Journey from the Harris Hotel up through the island to Borve House Hotel, Lewis

We weren’t really prepared for what a large place Lewis is. Or for the fact that once you get much above the half of the island which is Harris, most of the interest in Lewis appears to be round the edges.

Although on arriving from the Southern Islands we had been immediately struck by the evidence of increased prosperity – almost none of the deserted or ruined buildings, almost none of the abandoned and rusting farm and other machinery that on the whole tourists don’t care to photograph..

But after the beautiful hills and mountains of Harris, the central area of Lewis appears to be a huge expanse of more or less uniform peat bog. Which has its own fascination, but would be an heroic trek for anyone determined to complete the Hebridean Way on foot. Bicyclists were a different matter, although for them it is tough going as well, but there were a great many of them doing the trip.

Ancient sites along the way spoke of the milder climate in the Hebrides many centuries ago. The.Standing Stones of Callanish are 4,000 years old – older than Stonehenge – and the visitor centre and museum at the site did a good job of telling the various theories about the significance and purpose of the site. Two avenues of stones, one long and one short, crossed at what was clearly some sort of ceremonial centre. We checked the orientation of the long axis out of curiosity and found it ran towards the SSE. The stones themselves were more of the ancient gneiss rock, naturally grained and patterned and very beautiful, especially when the sun broke through the scudding clouds.

We were told that the visitor centre has been awarded a six million pound grant for upgrading, which was a bit eyebrow-raising. Let’s hope the stones are not going to be roped off from visitors as Stonehenge has been – although of course that was for excellent reasons. Progress, and all that.

Please expand the above pictures to get a getter idea.

The second visitor attraction along the way was the Iron Age tower of Carloway Broch. A mere 2,000 years old, this is a surprisingly sophisticated structure of double-skinned dry stone walls, with staircases inside them giving access to what were once upper floors.

This site was even less regimented than the standing stones, and you could go inside through the very low entrance, through another doorway opposite into the space between the walls. and climb up the first flight of the staircase.

It had turned into a sunny afternoon and the close turf was delightful to walk on. There was a steady, spread-out stream of visitors, but I was the only one who climbed the hillside behind to see and photograph the view from above.

From there we pressed on, past what was to be our hotel for the next two nights, to the northernmost point of our journey – the Butt of Lewis lighthouse. After mile upon mile through almost uninhabited country we came to a string of relatively heavily populated habitations at the very top of Lewis: South and North Dell, Swainbost, Habost, Lional and Eoropaidh. We wondered what on earth so many people could find to do up there, but were assured by a local that employment there was good.

The Butt of Lewis is known as one of the wildest and windiest places in the British Isles, but we found it, and its lighthouse, on a beautiful day. It was a lovely place, with intricately-folded metamorphic gneiss rocks, crashing waves, and seabirds, which we recognised as fulmars, roosting on the sheer rock faces in pairs who seemed to spend much of the time billing, though not actually cooing.

Having sat and walked on the short grass and talked to the cosmopolitan visitors, we started back along the road and almost immediately stopped above a little bay to which we descended and Lesley had a paddle in the sea.

The hotel was rather strange and did not live up to its star rating for us. Although it probably ticked all the boxes for a modern building it had fire doors every few paces in narrow corridors with no pictures on the walls, and for us it seemed soulless. Certainly in comparison with the more traditional hotels we stayed at and no comparison at all to the two B&Bs further south.

Wednesday 17th

The weather was deteriorating by the next morning, and we set off to have a look at Stornoway. With a population of around 9,000 it is by far the largest town in the Outer Hebridean chain. The general feel was much more like a mainland town, and a prosperous one at that, with streets of large well-built houses.

But at the same time much of it felt quite run down, and quite grey, It may have been the weather, and another frustrating experience with a charger, but we felt quite dispirited. But we found a Guardian, and the same day’s at that, and sat reading it in the lovely public library which had a delightful young woman librarian who allowed us to use the toilets which were marked ‘staff only’. Which was a good thing because the only public toilets were closed for renovation.

With the car fully charged – yes, I’m afraid I have to admit that doing this trip with an electric car, even one with a big battery like ours, charging does form a constant background preoccupation, and I would be misleading you if I didn’t include this aspect – with the car fully charged, we made our way to the castle and its modern museum, with a film of Hebridean landscape scenes projected onto three large walls, with no narration – just the sounds of nature. The museum continued with well-curated displays of aspects of Hebridean and Gaelic culture and history. Then we had a light lunch in the excellent cafeteria.

Heading west across the moor, on 17 miles of narrow, single-track road, we came to the village of Gearrannan – where a picturesque group of old Black Houses has been conserved to illustrate the very simple conditions in which the crofters lived, often with their livestock at the downhill end – helping to heat the building. At the end of the winter they would apparently take down the end wall, clear out the manure and bedding, and spread it on the fields.

The last families were moved into council accommodation as recently as the 1970s and fortunately it occurred to someone to preserve the village as a record.

The interior of one of the houses has been fully restored, with even a peat fire burning brightly in the grate,

At the other end of the building there was a demonstration of the weaving of Harris Tweed.- a traditional occupation of the villagers. This wonderful character was there six days a week patiently demonstrating to a constant stream of inquisitive visitors.

In the evening we decided to eschew the hotel restaurant, braving the rain to drive 10 minutes up island to The Cross Inn which was situated in what was little more than a scatter of houses called, unsurprisingly, Cross.

This was a warm, cheerful and bustling place and suited us fine. As elsewhere, it was a perfectly decent meal, though scarcely memorable. I finished off with a single malt, in valediction to an extraordinary trip, and Lesley drove us back to the hotel.

Completed in the next post…