Flying out to the 'Hebs’, you can enjoy an astonishing introduction to a bizarre and alien landscape quite different from any other in Britain. High mountain tops catch the North Atlantic clouds , miles of peat moorland are pocked with hundreds of thousands of tiny glistening lochans , the wonderful white sand beaches wind round the shores which weave to the horizon - it all looks invented , unreal , unfinished . Each of the major islands has its own character, Lewis, Harris, North and South Uist, Benbecula and Barra are all worth exploring for their unique cultural or natural flavours.

Spring comes as late as it can to these remarkable islands, bees only really start buzzing in mid May, and this is one of two key times to visit. On a sunny morning, you can walk the roads and tracks of the western lowlands and be forgiven for being able to forget the agricultural devastation that has wrecked much of our mainland’s so called countryside. It’s simply magic here, the lush fields ring with the cries of Lapwing and Redshank, which dance around your head as you pass innocently through their fiercely protected territories. The sheer density of these waders is amazing, and as pipits, skylarks, snipe, reed buntings and others add to the cacophony, the sense of a real living landscape is inescapable. You want to whistle just to add something to the obvious joys of the northern spring.

In the evening the snipe sit up on fence posts and then swoop down drumming to proclaim their territories , its an enigmatic sound sadly long lost from so much of the rest of Britain but they are not the 'nutty noisemakers' that so characterises this precious habitat. It’s the rasping call of the corncrake that draws ornithological pilgrims to the iris and nettle-beds of the Uists. The RSPB’s Benbecula Reserve is home to plenty of the grating males who will call sporadically in the day but go wild in the evening. The thing is that to see as well as hear them you must go in early May before the vegetation then rapidly shoots up and renders them invisible - thus transforming a birding icon into an irritating little monster!

Come back to this place in July and August to see the 'machair', as this ancient sandy crofting land is known, in full-blown bloom. It's a spread of wildflowers, which has few UK rivals. Great swathes of corn marigold render the meadows golden and in wetter spots, the ground is washed pink with the spidery flowers of ragged robin.

Earlier the irises and orchids have had their time and the diversity and then sheer density of what were, up until recently, common plants of our farmland is amazing but it must be said that this is more of a place to enjoy standing rather than kneeling - the painted fields are simply stunning.