Isle of Skye

Skye is shaped like a hand of rock spread out on the sea: a mountainous core, and from it a ring of peninsulas — Trotternish, Waternish, Duirinish, Minginish, Sleat — separated by sea lochs that cut so deep that nowhere on the island is more than about 8 km from salt water. The largest and northernmost of the Inner Hebrides at 1,656 km², it has carried names to match its weather: the Norse called it the misty isle, and one of its Gaelic names, Eilean a' Cheò, means much the same. Light here changes by the minute, and the island's drama comes from rock of very different kinds lying side by side.

At the centre stand the Cuillin. The Black Cuillin, of dark gabbro and basalt, form the most serious mountain ground in Scotland: a jagged ridge with twelve Munros whose full traverse can take fifteen to twenty hours, the Inaccessible Pinnacle — the only Scottish summit that demands technical rock climbing — and Sgùrr Alasdair, at 993 m the highest peak on any Scottish island. To the east the Red Cuillin are granite, weathered into rounded domes with long scree flanks. To the north, the Trotternish peninsula is a sheet of basalt lying on weaker sediments that has slid away in the longest landslip in Great Britain. Its debris left the Quiraing, a maze of pinnacles and hidden terraces that the Victorian poet Alexander Smith called a nightmare of nature, and the Storr, where the free-standing pillar of the Old Man rises from a field of rock needles beneath the cliffs. On the same coast Kilt Rock owes its name to roughly 70 m of columnar basalt, pleated like tartan cloth, and the Middle Jurassic beds of Trotternish have yielded dinosaur footprints and bones.

The west faces the open Atlantic. Duirinish is ringed by sea cliffs reaching nearly 300 m at Waterstein Head, and the lighthouse headland of Neist Point lies on the same peninsula, while the beaches of Glen Brittle in Minginish are black basalt sand. Dunvegan Castle on its sea loch has been the seat of Clan MacLeod since the thirteenth century and keeps the Fairy Flag, a treasured clan relic; it is reputed to have been lived in by one family longer than any other house in Scotland. Portree, the island's capital and largest settlement, sits around a harbour lined with painted houses at the foot of Trotternish.

Getting there

Since 1995 the Skye Bridge has linked Kyleakin with Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland; the A87 crosses it and runs on through Portree to Uig. Kyle of Lochalsh is the terminus of a railway from Inverness, and a ferry connects Mallaig, end of the West Highland Line from Glasgow, with Armadale in Sleat; a small turntable ferry also crosses the Kyle Rhea strait from Glenelg. The nearest airport with scheduled flights on the mainland is Inverness Airport (INV), about 130 km east of Portree in a straight line. Buses run from Skye to Inverness and Glasgow, and ferries leave Uig for the Outer Hebrides.