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of fame in the BBC Shipping Forecast. It also received mention in Enya's song Orinoco Flow'. Scots comedian Billy Connolly famously exposed the pseudo-Scottish pseudo-folk-song The Blue Misty Mountains of Tiree' as a fake, pointing out that ... anyone who's been to Tiree knows it's as flat as a bloody billiard-table!'

That isn't strictly true, although there's no way in which Tiree's few slight eminences could, even with fingers tightly crossed, be accurately described as mountains'.

Rather more poetic was The Independent newspaper describing the island as ... a bog, surrounded by miles of ash-blonde beaches'. There are indeed some boggy areas, but they are still productive enough to graze sheep and cattle. Most of the flatland is grass growing on shell sand. The Gaelic language has a word where English has a phrase, so this is most usually called the machair.

The houses dot the machair all contribute to Tiree's charm. There are white houses'; these are long, narrow, single-storey buildings, with a thatched and tarred roof and a chimney at one or both ends. They developed from an earlier, similar kind of house, where the smoke from the central fire was simply allowed to escape through a hole in the roof.

The resulting sooty interiors gave them the name of black houses'. Some have been converted to white houses, but a few still exist in their original form. Nowadays, though, they usually accommodate animals or farm machinery.

The most striking house design is peculiar to Tiree. Larger dwellings, built of stone blocks, receive additional proofing against the sometimes extreme weather by painting the mortar between the blocks with Snowcem, thus giving them the appearance and the name of Spotty Houses'.

The central bog' is worth visiting if you like birds. From Gott, on the southern coast, there's a fine walk along a grassy raised causeway. This enables a relatively dry-shod traverse of the softer areas, across the island to the northern coast.

This path leads past several little pools, or lochans. At the right time of the year, they will be alive with birds. On a May morning, saw large numbers of gulls, terns and geese of many kinds. A hat is strongly recommended!

At the northern shore, a path leads eastward towards Vaul. A large round boulder called the Ringing Stone stands by the side of this path. It really does ring when it's hit in the right place with a smaller stone. Further along, the Broch Dun Mhor, the remnant of a Pictish coastal fort, perched atop a slight

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