When, shortly before my holiday, I asked a food-loving Scottish friend for Outer Hebrides recommendations, I was hoping for an oyster shack, or a really great Stornoway black pudding roll. What I wasn’t expecting was guga. “I’m not sure if you’ll find them though,” she said doubtfully. “They’re quite seasonal.”
To my English ears, a guga could have been anything from a scallop to a scone. It is, in fact, a teenage gannet – old enough to have a bit of meat on it, but young enough to be easily caught, as they have been in these parts for millennia. The gannet was once a staple in the diets of islanders: it’s estimated that in the 17th century the tiny population of St Kilda caught an average of 22,000 a year. Today the hunt is confined to Ness, on the Isle of Lewis, which, following the outlawing of seabird fowling in 1954, holds the only remaining licence in the UK.
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