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There’s a wonderful book of photographs taken on South Uist in 1954 by the famous American photographer Paul Strand. It’s called ‘Tir a’Mhurain’ - land of bent grass - and the cover features one of Strand’s haunting Hebridean landscapes, looking south over the South Uist shoreline towards the island of Eriskay.
In the foreground a group of ponies stand facing out to sea, and this evocative image seems to capture perfectly the way in which these free-roaming animals, which for centuries were central to crofting life on the islands, fit in with the rugged terrain of the Outer Hebrides.
Paul Strand also visited the small neighbouring island of Eriskay where he would have encountered a slowly dwindling number of very similar ponies. Eriskay is now linked to South Uist by a causeway, but in those days the island’s remoteness, coupled
with difficulties in landing on its rocky shores, meant that the ponies on Eriskay were of a purer stock than those found elsewhere in the Hebrides. They are, in fact, believed to be the last survivors of the original ponies of the Western Isles, and could even be descendants of Scotland’s native wild horse.
The name Eriskay - Eric’s Isle – harks back to the days of the Viking occupation of the Hebrides a thousand or more years ago, and the ponies may therefore have some
