We started in Glasgow, where I anticipated a little difficulty in understanding the local accent. But I had no idea how different spoken English can be from what I think of as English, and still be called English. I just kept nodding while listening, and whenever I heard an "Eh?" responded with a slight laugh of agreement or a wise-sounding "Mm-hmm." Even the maitre d' failed to make me recognize more than one word in twenty. Then someone said, "I read recently that while you're listening to Glaswegian, you have to think faster: like dancing with somebody whose tempo is snappier than your own." So I tried it, and by golly, it worked! – sort of.

I was amazed, driving north out of the noise and bustle of Glasgow, how rapidly the land changed into virtually treeless highland moors, as open as Canadian Arctic tundra. It's almost impossible to visualize it as it was before it was clear-cut in the mid-nineteenth century for grazing sheep, and the farmers turned off it. Sheep were considered a more economical – and certainly a more profitable – use of the land than crofters. Here and there on the moor were plantations of pine and Sitka spruce. "Our Forestry Commission at work again," said our guide, drily.

We crossed the height of land at Rannoch Moor and descended into Glencoe, a spectacular glacial valley that was the scene of a notorious 1692 massacre of members of the Clan MacDonald by soldiers of the Campbell clan under orders of King William III. It's a fairly long story, but the short of it is that the Campbells, guests of the MacDonalds, turned on them at five o'clock on a stormy February morning, committing what under Scots law was called "murder under trust," more heinous than ordinary murder. The Campbells have borne the stigma to this day, which we ended at the foot of Ben Nevis (the British Isles' highest mountain (salmon finning softly in the River Nevis, the mountain gleaming white with quartzite; gotta come back here!).

Next day we traveled to the isles of Mull and Iona. St. Columba, surely one of the champion peripatetic saints of all time, arrived at Iona in 563 and founded his famous abbey, the first Christian site in Scotland. I peeked briefly into a tiny chapel where his bones are reputed to be interred. A Bible, opened to the Book of Proverbs, lay upon a reading stand. Somebody, clearly expressing an agenda, had bracketed the 22nd verse of the 11th chapter: "Like a gold ring in a pig's snout is a comely woman without common sense." This anonymous misogynist would have been right at home with Columba in his day. The doughty saint refused to keep cows, reputedly saying, "Where there are cows you have women, and where there are women, you have trouble."

On all our trips we try to use as many different conveyances as possible – bus, train, plane, catamaran, fishing boat, and ferry. So the next day we caught the famous Jacobite Steam Train. Never heard of it? Well, you've seen it. It's the train that Harry Potter and his friends take to Hogwarts. Even the picturesque viaduct is just as it looks in the films. I couldn't help sticking my head into a few compartments and saying. "Excuse me. I'm lookin' fer 'arry Potter." Finally a really scruffy-looking guy in a ratty wool toque pulled down over his ears brightened up and said, "I'm 'arry. How'd ye do?"

The tracks ended in the seaside town of Mallaig, where we caught a ferry to the Isle of Skye. Thence via another ferry through mist and heavy seas to the Outer Hebrides, where we're headed north over some of the oldest exposed rock on earth, the Lewisian gneiss, about 3 billion years old. (The Scots guides we've met all insist on calling it "three thousand million years old.")

When I learned we were coming here to Harris, I constructed a fantasy scenario, in which I got fitted for a tweed jacket (and applied for a second mortgage). But that's not the way it is at all. Even if there were shops, there's nobody here to go into them; the island's population is shrinking as its young people leave to live and work elsewhere. The famous tweed, we discovered, must – in order to be genuine Harris tweed – be "hand-woven by islanders of Lewis, Harris, Uist, and Barra in their homes, using pure virgin wool that has been dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides."

We visited a weaver at his shop. He'd been 36 years at the loom, and none of his kids were interested in continuing the family craft. He gets his warps pre-dyed, set up on a beam, and delivered from a mill in Lewis, along with an order for a particular pattern. He weaves the beautiful wool a yard wide; the mill picks it up and pays him by the "weaver's yard," actually 15 square feet. The cloth is marketed by the actual yard we're used to, 9 square feet, and the difference is the mill's profit. The heads of the men in our group have begun to sprout Harris tweed caps. If the current trend of dwindling numbers of weavers continues, and unless the definition of the product changes, those lids could someday be worth their weight in gold.

The learning curve in any travel is pretty intense, but it seems more than usually so here in the Western Isles. Tomorrow it's off to visit a BBC station that broadcasts in Gaelic, and after that, a mysterious ring of Neolithic standing stones. The wonders never seem to cease.