Luskentyre beach
Interesting facts
- The beach and its hinterland form the Luskentyre Banks and Saltings Site of Special Scientific Interest, designated in 1984 and covering 1,082 hectares.
- The protected site runs from open sea through sand flats, saltmarsh, dunes and machair to acid peat moorland, one of the finest such sequences in western Scotland.
- Behind the beach, high conical sand hills, dune ridges and blowouts build a promontory extending westwards, a landform found only on Harris.
- The dunes behind Luskentyre rise to more than 35 metres above sea level.
- In 2021 a plan to put glamping pods beside the beach was dropped after a petition against it gathered more than 10,000 signatures.
- Taransay, across the sound, is the largest Scottish island without a permanent population; its last resident family, the MacRaes, left in 1974.
- Taransay was inhabited by about AD 300, and its name is usually traced to the Irish Saint Ternan, known locally as Taran.
- According to island tradition, women were buried at Taransay's chapel of Saint Taran and men at Saint Keith's, and reversing this would make the dead rise.
- The waters of the bay also attract wintering wigeon and red-breasted mergansers alongside scoters, eiders and divers.
Why it is worth it
Luskentyre is a wide sweep of almost white shell sand on the west coast of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, where the shallow water over the sands of the bay turns every shade from pale green to deep turquoise. Across the Sound of Taransay rise the empty island of Taransay and, to the north, the bare mountains of North Harris; behind the beach a broad belt of high dunes and machair, the flower-rich coastal grassland of the Hebrides, separates the sea from the moor.
The beach is the largest on Harris. It curves for around three kilometres around Luskentyre Bay, where a sand bar reaches into the mouth of the estuary and the tide uncovers great flats of rippled sand. At its northern end it continues as Tràigh Rosamol, which looks north-west past Taransay towards the hills, and a string of smaller coves follows along the coast towards the headland of Àird Niosaboist. The hills around are made of Lewisian gneiss, among the oldest rocks in Europe. The bay and its sands are also a wintering ground for sea ducks and divers, among them common and velvet scoters, eiders, long-tailed ducks, great northern divers and Slavonian grebes.
Luskentyre itself is a scattered crofting settlement of farmsteads and a few houses at the end of a single-track road on the north side of the bay. Its Gaelic name is usually explained as "headland fort", though no fort has been found there; an old burial ground stands on the headland. Taransay, about three kilometres offshore, was abandoned by its last family in 1974 and became famous in 2000, when the BBC left 36 volunteers on it for a year for the television series Castaway 2000. Luskentyre has been voted Britain's best beach.
Getting there
Luskentyre lies on the west coast of South Harris, about 11 miles (18 km) from Tarbert, the main village of Harris, reached from the A859 by a minor single-track road. Tarbert has a car-ferry link to Uig on Skye. Stornoway on Lewis, with Stornoway Airport (SYY), is roughly an hour and a half away by road; Benbecula Airport (BEB) is about 51 km away in a straight line but lies across the Sound of Harris.
On these lists
57.88570, -6.95640per Wikidata