It's chilly when we awaken the next day. The electric fireplace has been running through the night, and the condensation on the window is glowing with the early morning sun coming up over the sheep pastures. Downstairs, Donna has laid out a spread of toast, fruit, and yogurt at the dining table in the living room, and she prepares a hearty breakfast of grilled mushrooms, tomatoes, freshly farmed eggs, and grilled shoulder bacon. Bessie runs in and out of the room, checking on our progress as attentively as a fancy restaurant waiter, while the cat sits stoically a few inches away from a space heater next to the fireplace. Donna comes over to chat with us, and is understandably disappointed that our whirlwind itinerary is taking us out of Glenelg and over the water to Skye. She suggests that we at least drive down the road to Glen Beag, to see two of the largest and best-preserved brochs (Iron Age stone dwellings) on the Scottish mainland, before catching the ferry from Glenelg to Kylerhea. She and her husband were married inside one of the brochs, so fond were they of its history and stately charm; she shows us an album of photos from her wedding day.
We take her up on her advice. Continuing east on the single-track road south of the village, we drive along another valley lined by pastures, pine forests, and a single feathery waterfall. We stop to watch the flocks of sheep with their new spring lambs (photo below), who ram their wooly heads into one another and skip awkwardly after their mothers. The herd suddenly takes off running along the fence, chasing after a pickup truck headed in the opposite direction. The driver hops out and pulls a big bag of feed from the truck bed. Breakfast.
At Dun Telve, we unlatch the sheep gate and walk in along the fence, admiring the circular, drystone tower. It is perhaps 30 feet tall and hollow, with walls several feet thick in some places. We walk into its center and look up, seeing little stone ledges - remains of a staircase, or perhaps room partitions. It is uncertain what structures like these, dating back several thousand years and built by the Pictish tribes, were used for - perhaps defensive structures, watchtowers, or high-class residences. A formidable chunk of human history sitting in a idyllic little valley on the Scottish coast.
After seeing the brochs, we drive back through the village and north to the ferry crossing, where the a hand-cranked turntable ferry - the Glenachulish, the last of its kind in the world - still shuttles passengers back and forth across the narrow strait to Skye on the half-hour in the warmer months. Dating back to the 1600s and previously the one true route "over the sea to Skye", the Kylerhea ferry came upon leaner times with the opening of the Skye Bridge in 1995, and is now community-owned and operated - another piece of living Scottish history for our morning. We watch at the dock as the boat pulls in, its wooden deck spinning steadily into position. I drive Diesel onto the boat. On board, Jane and I hop out of the car, savoring the breeze for the entire five-minute ride across the water. It is not how I envisioned reaching Skye ten years ago, but Donna was absolutely right: there is something magical about doing it the old way.
Across the water, we drive through the little village of Kylerhea and turn uphill to reach the car park for the wildlife sanctuary. We walk in, less than a mile through the pine woods on an easy gravel path, to an indoor hide that is popular with locals as a whale and porpoise and otter-watching spot. Binoculars to our faces, we watch the grey seals swimming around the rocks on the beach below, while the Glenachulish and its boat horn make their laps across the narrows.
Leaving Kylerhea and Skye's eastern coast, I drive us along the twisting, single-lane canyon road over the Kylerhea River. Jane falls asleep. After twenty minutes, we re-join the A87 and head west toward Broadford, pulling into the parking lot of the Skye Co-op in Broadford around noon. I wake Jane from her slumber ("Lunch. Pastries." "...Huh? Okay.") and we head into the grocery store and bakery, where we discover the wonders of the Portuguese egg tart, from which the Hong Kong egg tart (蛋撻; dàn tǎ) was derived. It is virtually identical to the dim sum dessert that I grew up loving, except that the top is generously carmelized, and it is available here and now, to two young Chinese-Americans vacationing on the Isle of Skye, for less than a dollar a pop. We buy out the bakery's stock (along with our usual sandwiches and drinks) and throw it in the car. Heading west on the island, we stop at the old stone bridge in the settlement of Sligachan before continuing on to Glenbrittle at the foot of the Skye's most imperious mountain range - the Black Cuilins.
From the busy car park at Glenbrittle, we set off on the footpath into the valley and toward the mountains. Walking east along the River Brittle, we hop over stones and waterfalls, passing alongside crystal-clear pools of blue and turquoise water, runoff from the heart of the Cuilins. As we continue, the waterfalls grow taller and the other day-trippers climbing the rocks and sunning by the pools become more sparse, while the mountains ahead grow taller and ever-more-imposing. The clear dirt path soon degenerates into a rough peat track across the heather moor. We continue to climb into the foothills.
At the foot of the Black Cuilins, we find ourselves in an amphitheater of mountains: Bruach na Frithe ("Slope of the Deer Forest") to our left, Sgurr Thuilm ("Peak of the Hillock") to our right, and straight ahead, Sgurr an Fheadain ("Peak of the Chanter"), a pyramidal block of gabbro bisected by a deep cleft (Waterpipe Gully, one of the more technical rock climbs in the country). We scramble partway up the loose rock scree that leads into the mountains, and reach the entrance to Coire na Creiche ("Corrie of the Spoils"), the mountain cirque where the MacDonalds climactically defeated the remnants of Clan MacLeod in 1601, in the last such battle on Skye.
Turning away from the stream, we head north now, following the flanks of Bruach na Frithe toward Sligachan. The way is muddy; in hindsight, we likely lost the walking path soon after reaching the corrie, and wind up following a less-beaten trail across the moor. Boots squishing in the mud, we peer ahead into the endless expanse of peat bog, trying to discern any signs of a path - a flattened patch of grass, an opening in the heather, a few scattered footsteps in the mud. There are no other humans for miles around, and it is mid-afternoon. Alone in a massive landscape, and acutely aware of the caprices of mountain weather, a very mild worry sets in. Jane suggests bee-lining across the moor back toward our car (we can still see the edge of the forest near the car park), but we are on the wrong side of the River Brittle, and the undulating landscape guarantees us running into some nasty terrain. We continue picking our steps across the slope, jumping up and down terraces of peat in order to find the least muddy way forward. At intervals, there is a small boulder beside our path; Jane hops on one to get a better look at our surroundings. At first I think they are just glacial erratics cast off from the mountain, but after awhile it becomes clear that they are trail markers, quite deliberately spaced. We are on a path, if not the right one.
After an hour of following boulders and vague intuition across the moor, we are vindicated by the sighting of another path up ahead, cutting east-to-west between Sligachan and Glenbrittle. We hop over one last pit of mud and scramble up the side of a waterfall, emerging gratefully onto a well-trodden gravel path. Turning left here, we walk along the other side of the river, passing around the edge of a forestry zone to connect back up with our original path. We return to the Glenbrittle car park around 4 PM, concluding an unexpectedly eventful six miles of walking in the south of Skye. Jane briefly takes over the driver's seat while I eat a Portuguese egg tart with a box of pineapple juice and half of a leftover sandwich.
Leaving Glen Brittle and the Cuilins behind, we drive north now along the west coast of Skye, taking the A863 toward Dunvegan. On a peninsula near Carbost, we get a magnificent view of the Atlantic Ocean and the minor islands to our west, glimmering under the afternoon sun. We continue, passing by villages, cottages, and little crofting communities. Near Bracadale we stop in a car park, and climb up a hill covered in sheep and little pellets of sheep dung. We arrive at the broch of Dun Beag, a massive stone fortification quite similar to the ones near Glenelg. Jane climbs to the top of the tower ruins and gazes out across the west of Skye, north to the Duirinish Peninsula and the pair of prominent mesas known as MacLeod's Tables. To our south is an open, gorgeous view back to the Minginish Peninsula and the Cuilins; the mountains continue to appear raw and imposing, even in the distance. As the sun begins to fall toward the horizon, we set off again toward our last stop of the day.
Just before Dunvegan, we turn west off the A863 onto a one-lane road the crosses the Duirinish Peninsula. We pass the villages of Colbost and Glendale (Jane is asleep again), and the road becomes somewhat more narrow and harrowing as the countryside gives way to sea cliffs and rocky Hebridean coastline. Near sunset, we arrive at the westernmost tip of Skye, a finger of rock pointing west across the Minch to the isles of Uist, Harris, and Lewis. We descend the cliff from the car park and walk across the headland toward the lighthouse on Neist Point. Jane stops to admire the colonies of gannets and black guillemots that inhabit the cliffs, breeding and nesting and artfully smearing their guano atop the pillars of hexagonal basalt. As the day ends, we take portraits together on the edge of a cliff near the lighthouse, the sea birds crying and flying through the air around us. In the distance, the Outer Hebrides are silhouetted by the setting sun, and I am reminded of the book Sea Room by Adam Nicolson, a Cambridge-educated author who, through a twist of fate, ends up owning the Shiants, a tiny set of Scottish isles somewhere out there in the Minch. His book, half family memoir and half work of love for his islands' geography, geology, flora, fauna, and human history, is what stays with me as I take the photos below, with the wind whipping and the sea birds flying overhead.
The sun has nearly reached the horizon when we return to the car park and drive back across the peninsula (the single lane road across the sea cliffs is no less harrowing in the diminishing light and with Jane awake). We finally return to the highway (it is around 8 PM at that time) and set off past Dunvegan and east across Skye at a blistering pace. The roads are nearly empty now, and despite the long day and the late hour, what follows is the best thirty minutes of driving in my life - flying across the moors of central Skye, wind turbines and farming villages all around us. The sky turns pink and then purple, and the open plains glow golden in the last bits of daylight. It is nearly dark when we reach the little settlement of Borve, on the outskirts of Portree (the large fishing town on the east coast of Skye). Our host for the night, Dougie at the Eubhal House, comes out to greet us as we pull into his driveway, a little gravel road next to a tractor behind a farm shed. He has been worried about us, and we apologize for our unexpectedly late arrival (we later realize that he emailed multiple times earlier in the evening, probably concerned that we were lost or had canceled our trip). Dougie shows us to our room, where we fill out breakfast cards and munch on our standard road dinner - sandwiches, juice, Scotch pies, and dessert pastries. Sitting in our country house, I gaze out the bedroom window, at the vast expanse of island landscape receding into the darkness. A truly memorable first day on Skye.
