BARRA, which should on no account be confused with Barra-in-Furness, is the most westerly island of the Outer Hebrides. It’s the one described by the goggle-eyed Private Fraser in Dads Army as a wild and lonely place and there are days when doubtless he has a point.

Last Wednesday, part of a week’s island hopping, wasn’t one of them.

The sun shone upon the deserted white beaches, the folk of Castlebay smiled at strangers, the Co-op sold a mean mutton pie and we walked the machair – the grassy coastal strip – without machair in the world.

The highlight, however, was Barra Airport, the only one in Britain to be built, quite literally, on sand and opened in 1936 at the same time as another grassy little airstrip in Sussex.

They called that one Gatwick.

Planes – sometimes two scheduled flights a day, sometimes three – land and take off on a glorious beach surrounded by mountains. Handfuls of passengers stroll across the sand from the terminal building with the insouciance of a Redcar sun seeker off to buy the bairn a toffee apple.

The check-in is in the same room as a café which sells execrable coffee but offers, speciality of the house, curried cockle toasties.

The baggage reclaim resembles a little-used small town bus shelter; the lady brings tickets to the café seats. The website notes under “facilities” that there’s also a public telephone, while the official notice board carries information on everything from a survey of blue-nose dolphin movements to Mickey Mouse costume hire.

Crowds gather to watch the daily plane splash in from Benbecula. It’s altogether magical.

All this, of course, may offer some small comfort to the poor, cashstrapped, crash-landed airport on our doorstep. Compared to bonny Barra, the departure lounge at Durham Tees Valley may resemble Terminal 3 at Heathrow.

EVER-vigilant, Janet Murrell in Durham returns whence it came an Echo cutting about a diet of “barley bread and beach leaves”. Cynthia Knight twigs similarly.

Seaweed, wonders Janet? Too much sand in his sandwiches, surmises Cynthia? Trouble is, it was one of mine, the At Your Service column a week back Saturday clearly high on the thought of becoming a Barra boy. Apologies.

HOLIDAY reading, the Church Times carries a piece – as did the Echo – about the enforced closure of the Saxon St Hilda’s church at Ellerburn, near Pickering, because of a bat infestation.

The details are highly unpleasant, the congregation can stand it no longer. Like great crested newts, however, the blighters are untouchable.

Clearly more important than the congregation of an historic church.

The Guardian’s nature notes, meanwhile, more sympathetically detail a bat watch at Allendale, in Northumberland. Each one, it’s said, eats three million midges a night (which, you have to admit, is going some.) Midges are the curse of the highlands and islands of Scotland, particularly fond of the lady of this house. Like gentlemen, they prefer blondes. The answer, clearly, is to shift the whole lot of them to the west coast of Scotland. Then everyone will be happy.

WE made it back in time for the first night of the Darlington and District League 5s and 3s season, the night of the epochal plebiscite on whether women should be allowed to enter the hitherto menonly sanctuary. The result of the referendum remains unknown, the result of the game that the Brainless Britannia B managed somehow to win 5-3. Some of us still played like women, nonetheless.

SPRAT to catch a mackerel, we have been wondering why railway wagons were called dogfish and discovered great shoals of them.

Eric Lambert now kindly provides the definitive list, a dogfish officially being a “24-ton hopper ballast wagon, VB standard”.

There are starfish and sole, grampus and gudgeon, lamprey and ling, walrus, whelk and winkle. So the great train of thought continues. A 12-ton ballast brake van with plough was a cockle.

All this, as we noted, was a sort of shorthand to speed telegraphic communication.

A creosote tanker makes the fishmonger’s slab, too. It was known as a creosote. Tar.

THOSE cockles may never have been more greatly needed than on the wildy exposed Stainmore Summit, 1,370ft up on the trans-Pennine line from Barnard Castle to Tebay. To mark the line’s 150th anniversary, a replica sign – made in Ferryhill – has been erected. The picture shows Mark Keefe, one of the driving forces, on an appropriate high. Now, says Mark, all they want back is the railway.

The Stainmore and all its works have usually featured in the John North column, now abed. It may continue to overlap until the final Gadfly appears on September 21.