//
Small history museum and cafe. Balallan village straggles for four miles along Loch Erisort, so the crofters each had access to their own beach to draw up boats, and a strip of grazing and vegetable patch behind.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
is at the boundary of Lewis and Harris. After his defeat at Culloden, the Prince's first escape attempt brought him to the Outer Hebrides in hopes of a passage to France, but it proved a dangerous dead-end. On 4 May 1746 he landed with a few supporters in Harris and hiked overnight to Stornoway. No "speed bonny boat" for him there, the town was hostile, but he was able to sail south to the Uists then back to Skye thence to the Scottish mainland.
On A858 is a monument to a failed attempt in 1850 to turn these peat bogs into arable farmland. A settlement was built near the existing village of Lochganvich, but within a year all the settlers had despaired and left.
Iconic of Lewis, this is the chief circle ("Callanish I") of an extensive ritual landscape. It was erected some time 2900-2600 BC and is an irregular circle of 13 stones surrounding a monolith, with a cross of avenues or aligned stones radiating. A chambered tomb within the circle was added later: it was only discovered when 19th-century peat-cutting revealed the true height of the stones. They're of local gneiss and have no obvious astronomical alignment.
A broch or round tower built around 200 BC and inhabited until 1000 AD; it was a hideout of cattle thieves in the 17th century. Parts of the broch walls still reach their original height of 9 m.
A village of blackhouses occupied until the 1970s. Nine have been restored: one as a hostel and others as self-catering cottages, see Sleep. The one you visit is a museum showing village life circa 1960, not long after electricity reached the area.
Two thatched buildings that have been "netted" and the nets weighted with stones to keep the roof from being ripped away by high winds. The larger is a kiln for drying grain, so it operated at relatively low temperature, whereas the heat of a pottery kiln would make short work of a thatched building. The smaller is a click mill or Norse mill, where the waterwheel is set horizontally in the flow of a mill lade. This means it doesn't need gears, but directly drives grindstones to render wheat into flour. It was used into the 1930s, restored in 1968 and again in 1996. Use the parking lot on the main road and follow the track a quarter-mile north.