Historic Scotland & National Trust for Scotland places in Western Isles

A thatched Hebridean blackhouse of the 1850s to 1890s on Lewis, kept as its crofting family left it, peat fire still burning, box beds and byre, with a 1920s white house beside it; adult £8.50, half price in the first EH year.

Iron Age broch of about 200 BC still standing nine metres tall on a knoll on the west coast of Lewis, its broken side a cross-section of the double wall; free, open all year, community visitor centre with toilets on the path.

The Macneils' 15th-century castle in the sea on an islet in Castlebay, Barra, seen on a one-hour hard-hat tour by HES boat; summer only, booked in advance online; adult £10, half price in the first EH year.

Early 16th-century MacLeod church at the southern tip of Harris, the grandest medieval building in the Western Isles, with Alasdair Crotach's carved tomb of 1528; free, open daily, lay-by parking at the door.

A mysterious oval enclosure and stony mound uncovered by peat cutters at Shader on Lewis, long called a cairn and stone circle but perhaps a 4,000-year-old farmstead, above Loch an Dùin; free, open all year, boggy underfoot.

Three uninhabited seabird islands south of Barra with a deserted village above a white beach, Britain's highest lighthouse and sea cliffs, reached by boat from Castlebay.

The islands at the edge of the world, a dual World Heritage Site with a million seabirds, Britain's highest cliffs and the village evacuated in 1930, by day boat from Harris or Uist.