At Scotland's western frontier, where the sky envelops the land and the ocean pours over the horizon, lay the Outer Hebrides. A collection of islands whose evocative beauty and wild landscape has been carved over millennia by wind and wave; from the white sands and turquoise shores of their Caribbean beaches to the rough, empty moors and their shattered cliffs, torn from the land by angry storms. Here time becomes less tangible, marked only by the passing of the sun, melting into the water beneath a funeral pyre of colours, and rising from the ashes again the next day.

The sense of remoteness echoes strongly on the smaller islands, where the deserted crofts and cottages are being slowly swallowed by the encroaching sand. Between the isles of Lewis and North Uist, and under the watchful gaze of the Isle of Harris, lies a number of such islands. Once the home to a few hundred hardy Scots, they now lie abandoned. A combination of the Highland Clearances that began in the 18th Century and the harshness of island life drove the occupants away from their homes and lands. Two hundred years later, their once familiar shores were to become our destination.