Truly Inspiring Adventure

Sean Mcfarlane has many spell-binding locations for his outdoor adventures, but there is one that tops his list by far - the outer hebrides.

- Sean McFarlane

For us Brits, it’s all too easy to forget how many vast and incredibly diverse areas of truly stunning landscape we have at home - all ideal for a whole host of outdoor activities and perfectly ripe for a wide variety of epic adventures. Like many a reader, I’ve far too many favourites to list in their entirety, with the likes of the Lake District, Snowdonia, the Yorkshire Dales, the Mourne Mountains, the Chilterns and the Cairngorms being just a few of my top choices. So you might think that choosing a favourite would be a tough job. Yet without fail one area leaps out ahead of all those other world-class locations: the islands of the Outer Hebrides off Scotland’s north west coast. Time and time again, a trip to these most wonderful of islands penetrates my mental fabric in a way that no other place does. It’s simply awe-inspiring. So when the all new “Heb” adventure race was announced, there was only one place I was going to be that weekend.

The Heb was resurrected by Paul McGreal, the well known Scottish race organiser famed for his love of adventure. With races like Celtman to his name, and as a director of the newly announced Edinburgh 70.3, there’s no doubt he knows what he’s doing. The race had been run in a variety of forms over the years, starting off in the ‘90s as the Western Isles Challenge and later becoming the Hebridean Challenge. Those events were week-long affairs, but now the Heb is a two-day effort for pairs or solos, based in the central islands of South Uist, Benbecula and North Uist. I entered the solo class, thinking that if you want something done properly, do it yourself. In reality, I just didn’t want to get someone else lost as well as me.