After last year’s amazing trip to Pabbay we thought we’d follow that up with a trip to Mingulay for more awesome climbing on another mythical uninhabited island in the Scottish Outer Hebrides…
Unfortunately for us the weather really wasn’t playing along this time though!
We were continually battered by storms coming in off the Atlantic. Many of which were highly energetic and landed several centimetres of hail stones on our tents. Not only was noise sheltering inside the tent impressive, it was like a winter wonderland outside after each storm. Surely a white ice encrusted landscape isn’t normal in June?!
The worst night of storms also saw the group tent we’d brought along for more social meal times etc. completely flattened. Even worse, one of our group had a pole snap in the relentlessly gusting wind. The snapped pole went on to rip a 30cm long gash in their tent too. Not good in the endless hail and rain storms!
There was a second group on the island. They had somewhat less ‘mountain’ oriented tents that faired even worse in the storms. Almost all of their tents got flattened! Which in a lucky twist for us was a bit of a saviour, as when they were out in the middle of the night salvaging what they could it was them who ran to save our battered group tent from blowing away off into the ocean!
Anyway, in one short interlude from the storms we were treated to the most amazing display from the puffins…
In other respites from the weather we did manage some climbing on Skipisdale Wall, Arnamul Wall (the only day of our short week that was actually sunny), and Waterfall Geo…
Eventually, with the prospect of more rain and strong winds, we conceded (with the help of an email to Francis, the skipper of our boat, The Boy James) that even the ferry back from Barra to Oban might get cancelled on Saturday. So we opted to bail on Thursday and catch the ferry back to the mainland on Friday … cutting the trip two days short. Our co-inhabitants with their wrecked tents had already left on Tuesday, the day after the worst storm that destroyed many tents!