In December 1974 - one could scarcely imagine a more daunting time of year for launching a new life in the Outer Hebrides - a young English couple, Gerald and Margaret Ponting, settled in Lewis.

They had two small children; he was from Hampshire and she had a weakness for cats. Gerald had just secured a teaching position - biology - in Stornoway's Nicolson Institute and they had bought a place in Callanish, for little more reason than they liked the house.

It wasn't their first time in the Western Isles. There had been leisurely holidays from 1970 and the Pontings had hopes for self- sufficiency. And, ambling often around the village's mysterious Standing Stones, they grew puzzled at how little had ever been written about them.

An interest - initially just one amidst new enthusiasm for sheep, goats, hens and vegetables and peat-cutting - became an obsession. By 1978, the Pontings were the world experts on the Callanish Stones.

By the early Eighties, they were making signal archaeological discoveries. In his genial column for the local paper, Gerald urged locals to keep a keen eye out for any curiosities unearthed while, every spring, cutting their peats - and stressed that anything wooden should be kept in water, lest it rapidly reduce to shrivelled uselessness.

This isn't a tale about self-important blow-ins throwing their weight around. The Pontings got on well with their neighbours, respected local custom - like the Sabbath - and quietly beavered away in what, today, in the rear-view mirror, was substantial and important scholarship.

With real-world consequence. They proved, beyond doubt, that Stone 35 in the Callanish complex was not in its original place: there had been Victorian interference. They found the lost Stone 33A, long recumbent in the bog, and were instrumental in having it re-erected in exactly the right socket.

Probing adjacent drystone dyking found the missing tip of Stone 19 and ensured that repair too.

The Callanish Stones on Lewis

Launching a new life in Lewis, 50 years ago, was no business for cissies. There were then no supermarkets and most roads were still single-track. There was but one distinctly snowy television channel. Even in 1974, quite a few still lived in traditional blackhouses.

Much greengrocery we now take for granted was then unobtainable and you would have struggled to buy things like pasta and wine.

Further, though perfectly safe - most of rural Lewis had a mains supply by the 60s - the peaty tap-water was then the colour of ginger ale.

And of course, as Gerald Ponting, 86, details in his engaging new book, there was no internet. Which meant if, for instance, the Pontings needed to check something out at the Public Records Office, Kew, they had physically to go there.

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Having fought their way to London, Gerald and Margaret found the pace of research flowed like treacle.

Typing this query and that into a fat desktop terminal whose computing power would today be disgraced by your mum's dishwasher, they would then have to twiddle their thumbs for an age till some Kew functionary materialised with a file from the vaults.

Not always the right one; at the first attempt, seeking the notebooks of the first Callanish Stones survey - by the magnificently named Augustus Pitt Rivers and William Tomkin in 1885 - the Pontings were presented with the 1942 minutes of the Bombing Sub-Committee.

There were other complications. Historically, virtually any artefacts of importance found in Lewis swiftly fetched up in a distant metropolitan museum. Such was the fate, for instance, of the 'Adabrock Hoard' and the celebrated Lewis Chessmen, the cheeky chaps who inspired Noggin the Nog.

And though, over the decades, many archaeological teams have hit the island for a meticulous dig, getting sight even decades hence of the written-up results was the stuff of extracting impacted wisdom-teeth.

Even so, Gerald and Margaret Ponting's New Light on the Standing Stones of Callanish (1977) remains the standard work, to say nothing of the researches into the many other stone-circles, chambered cairns, tumbled megaliths and so on ascertained or unearthed in what is a surprisingly small area of western Lewis.

The famous complex apart, there are the remains of 11 other stone-circles around Callanish alone - it seems to have been, for the Obelixes of the day, the equivalent of Glastonbury - to say nothing of sites at Achmore, Garynahine, Shawbost and so on.

As late as the 1920s, too, blackhouses were still being built, and a handy local circle of 'Druidical Stones' was a big temptation if you were after a lintel.

Then there is the sea. The inundated remains of past communities can still be found off the shore and around some capes and headlands coastal erosion is an abiding problem.

Passing from the destruction wrought by unauthorised metal-detectorists - Stornoway's Museum nan Eilean has given out rough words to eBay - there is, above all, the peat.

It blankets the island, ten feet or more thick - when a neighbour recently had a JCB in to claw down to the bedrock for a new driveway, the final trench could have easily hidden a Ford Transit van - and is still being formed, if very slowly.

Gerald Ponting's book

Untold wonders are concealed in its depths, such as the magnificent stone axe unearthed in April 1982 by the MacMillan family, of Shulishader, while cutting peats.

Stone axe-heads are not unusual, but in this instance the wooden haft had, almost uniquely, been preserved - and, having read their Ponting, the MacMillans at once wrapped it in sodden cloth.

The excited children got to appear on Blue Peter and the axe - dated between 2910 BC and 3490 BC - is now in the National Museum of Scotland.

The stone, intriguingly, was porcellanite from a known axe factory in County Antrim - and that it fetched up on Lewis suggests a much more sophisticated, trading society than we tend to imagine.

There is an elegiac air to Gerald Ponting's chatty memoirs because, in 1983, he and Margaret separated. They both moved on and remarried. Having quit Lewis in 1984, he has rarely visited since.

But both kept up the scholarship and, on her death in 2022, obituaries of Margaret Curtice appeared in London newspapers. (Her family, meanwhile, had the daunting job of rehoming her 30 cats.)

Departing for the mainland, Gerald told his readers: 'I am going to judge other ways of life, other attitudes, against Lewis - and find them wanting.'