A festive postcard from... Ullapool

As Christmas approaches we’re about to take a few weeks off from Elsewhere business, so we’ll leave you with season’s greetings and this festive postcard from Julia Bennett. We’ll be back in January with more writing, art, events and more...

Thursday evening, late November. At 5.30pm it is already dark along the north west coast of mainland Scotland. The ferry is about to leave for Stornoway, 50 miles across the Minch on the Isle of Lewis. A well-wrapped crowd gathers at the end of West Shore Street by a stack of creels. A drone buzzes overhead. As the ferry begins to move it turns and backs up like a learner driver practising 3-point turns in a narrow road. Luckily the ferry captain is an expert and the ferry turns and backs up, turns and backs up, until its search light is shining onto the shore. Then the hooter sounds and a moment later the sea front is lit up: strings of white lights like bunting hanging from posts all along the front, waving the ferry off. And most magical of all, the stack of creels is transformed into a Christmas tree swathed in red, blue and green lights and topped, not with a star or an angel, but with a crab.

A December day in Ullapool has an average of just over 6 ½ hours of daylight and only 45 minutes (if you’re lucky) of sunshine. Ullapool’s lights are a sign of human presence, of potential safety from the unknown but well-imagined dangers of the dark. The musical lighthouse on West Terrace flashes along in time to well-known tunes every evening. Strings of coloured lights in the shape of sailing boats welcome visitors arriving by road. The lights are idiosyncratic, imaginative and fun, telling the stories of this place. They shout out from a small fishing village into the darkness of a Scottish winter: Fàilte. 

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Julia Bennett is a sociologist who researches place and belonging