As expected, it was a beautiful morning at the Farmhouse. The slightly hazy, slanting sun in the East brought out a whole different set of colors in the water and the hills than it had in the evening. We had a persistent cuckoo outside the front door every morning, and lots of other birds all around us. Cereal for breakfast, primed my water bottle with a couple of tea bags, we all made sandwiches for ourselves and packed our packs with an extra sweater or whatever, and we were ready to go.
But where to? We’d had some discussion the night before about what hikes to approach and in what order. The consensus seemed to be that we should head for Brothers Point, South of Staffin on the Trotternish Peninsula, but that we should listen for the siren song of serendipity on the way. Jim drove and we started out South on the A863, through Dunvegan itself. We stopped to read menus posted at the few restaurants in town for future consideration.
The sun had burned off the haze, it was warm and windy, and the sheep and the incredible views were all around us as we weaved uphill and downhill. We wound around the coasts of Loch Vatten and Loch Caroy, and then realized that we were about to go by one of the sites on my list of possible places to visit, Dun Beag Broch. And they had a car park, pull over here! There was one other car in the car park, and we met those people (an American couple from Phoenix) as they were leaving. That means we had the place all to ourselves for an hour or two.
We had to climb a steep hill through lots of sheep and sheep shit, wet patches, and gorse bushes to get up to the broch and it was just wonderful, with the view down to the sea expanding with each foot of altitude we gained. Dun Beag Broch is one of the most well-preserved examples of an Iron Age broch, and it was amazing no one else was there that morning. It was one of the most fantastic things we saw and a great way to start off our trip to Skye.
I won’t go into what brochs were for, as this is subject to debate and so would take a long answer. In short, they were residences/fortresses that sometimes were several stories high and were basically round rock structures with curtain walls. We climbed all over the ruins of this one once we reached the top of the hill, and tried to imagine what it would have been like to live there, and/or to see Viking ships coming down the Loch.
That was fun and took just the right amount of energy. We piled back in the car eventually and continued South down the A863, but then turned to the Northeast on the B885 toward Portree. This was one of the hairiest roads we traveled on, a single-lane, potholed track balanced on a ridge, going steeply uphill and down, winding among the hills with sheep and occasionally another car trying to use the road too. It was spectacular (unless you were driving), with only a few scattered farmhouses and/or crofts. We passed the picturesque headwaters of the Snizort River and started downhill into Portree, with the road getting steeper and steeper and finally joining the A road outside of town.
Portree was just as we had left it the day before, with tourists already queueing at the toilets. We went through town and exited North on the A855. Some things in the guidebooks we looked at were called, “one of the most popular sites on Skye,” and we were now on the East Trotternish coast which features many of those popular sites. The traffic was pretty intense, especially when the road shrank to one lane, passed over a narrow bridge, and/or passed a scenic turnoff.
We saw some weird rocks sticking out from the cliffs high above us a few miles ahead, and realized this was the Old Man of Storr and consulted our book of local walks. It said that this was a “B” walk and we figured it wouldn’t be that bad so decided to stop. Some walks around there were rated “A” or even “A+,” and this meant that you should have back-country gear to try those. But the Old Man hike was only described as “short and steep,” and we were psyched. Well, it was steep, but I don’t know where they got the “short” from. It was comparable to the Angel’s Landing hike in Zion National Park in grade, length, and number of people.
The car park was very large and very packed when we got there. Again, where had all these people come from? We all detoured to the toilets (they’re building new visitor facilities, and everything was in disarray), then assembled at the bottom of the hike. It was a very bright day by then and would have been oppressively hot except for the strong and sometimes chilly Southwest wind. I was down to a t-shirt after a few hundred feet of vertical, though some people kept their winter coats on.
The path wound up and up, finally crested a hill, and the basalt column named the Old Man was right in front of us, threatening to fall on us. It’s at the Southern end of the Trotternish Ridge and is part of a spectacular rock formation. It’s well worth visiting and the views of the Sound of Raasay and the islands from there are extraordinary. We kept on uphill and were soon very high up in the sky, the car park was an ant farm far beneath us. We kept on and finally crested another ridge, where there was a big plateau and we had to make a decision.
We were perhaps two thousand feet above sea level at that point, and the path continued upwards for another 500 feet or so, enabling you to actually walk around the Old Man and the pinnacles next to it. But we had a great view from where we were, the last bit of the path was narrower and so even more crowded than the bit we’d done, and we were peckish. We looked around the plateau for a place sheltered from the wind enough so we could eat our sandwiches, but there was none, and we decided to head back down to the car and hope there’d be a ground-level picnic table in our near future.
Got back to the car and saddled up once again, all very impressed with the Old Man and oppressed by the crowd. The heavy tourist presence followed us North, but we decided to stop next at Lealt Falls, as our guidebook said nice things about it, and we were getting pretty hungry.
Lealt Falls is in a gorge on the coast formed by the Lealt River, which historically had some diatomite mines upstream and a dock for loading barges in the little bay at the mouth of the river. We managed to get a space for the car there, then went out to the overlook to gawk at the lovely falls themselves. From there we headed up the headland and miraculously stumbled on a sheltered bay of the convoluted car park that was out of the wind (relatively) and had some vacant picnic tables! It was time for a nice lunch and a nice rest, and to watch some of the other tourists getting stuck in a stile.
From there we climbed a little farther, out to the point itself, and were rewarded with some great views, though the wind tried to knock us down the cliffs. Ok, time to really get to where we were heading when we started out, Brothers Point. Got back to the car and drove just a few more miles up the A855, stopping in another almost full car park, though this one was far from the industrial-sized ones at the other attractions, it was just a dinky little pull-off by the side of the road.
We all found the Brothers Point walk as wonderful as advertised, possibly because it wasn’t very well advertised and so was not crawling with people. It’s a beautiful place but you must be willing to scramble over rocks and get your feet wet and muddy in bogs. We didn’t go all the way out to the farthest point, and by the time we got back up the bank to the trailhead, we were all pretty exhausted. But again, it was spectacular. Note that I’ve seen “Brothers Point” spelled with apostrophes in various places, but mostly without; all sites seem to agree that the meaning of the name is lost in antiquity, so I figure without is fine.
We climbed down a steep sheep trail to the beach (where a tourist was offering a handful of grass to a lamb, who was hurriedly ushered away by its worried mother) and crossed a stream on rocks, then walked along the beach out onto the point. From a ridge running down the point, there are terraces of moorland leading down to the water, and at times we had to clamber up onto one terrace or another to get by cliffs and inlets. The tide was out and wonderfully pockmarked, copper ledges with oystercatchers flying between them were exposed by the water. We could see iconic Kilt Rock, one of the most popular places on Skye, from there … close enough. And we could see the outline of the Outer Hebrides in the distance. The banks above us held hidden caches of wildflowers, and water streamed down through the peaty marsh toward the shore. It was non-intuitive but true here and in many other places that the higher you climbed up a bank in the moor, the wetter and muddier it became. This was probably due to the ability of the peat to hold water.
We were sheltered from the wind down on the beach, and we got pretty far out onto the point before we finally turned around reluctantly and started back. We knew it would be quite a climb back to the car, and it was, especially when the wind caught us in our faces as we got to the top. Though the day continued to be glorious, and we were thrilled by all we’d seen, it sure was getting time to start thinking of home and a nice cup of tea.
SarahP took over the driving and we headed back past the crowded East coast of Trotternish to the turmoil of Portree, and then the road back to Dunvegan (the A road, not the B road we’d been on that morning). We stopped at the Co-op for the Guardian though and were startled by two fighter jets flying over very low.
Made it back to Dunvegan and then through the woods to the Farmhouse. It had been a long day, but soon it was time to go back out (after we’d changed into our dinner finery) to the Blas Restaurant in Dunvegan, which had looked like a promising place from our scouting that morning. They were doing a good takeaway business, but had a few tables too, and we found the location and the waitress charming. The food wasn’t as good as we’d hoped, my salmon salad was dry and tasteless, though SarahE really liked her venison burger.
Back to the Farm again, and that evening we relaxed with a card game that Mollie had taught SarahP and Jim, Cabo. We watched a little TV also on our nights in Skye, mainly MasterChef and Race Across the World. But I forget exactly what games and/or shows happened each night.
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