That's how Skye fitted into our End-Of travels - June would be the right time of year to go visit, a bit too soon for Scotland's single day of Summer (July 24th, between 1pm & 3pm) but Spring should be pretty decent. We'd hire a car from Edinburgh, drive up across Scotland to Skye, drive around Skye while we were there and then drive across Scotland back to Edinburgh. With a bit of a tightish schedule, we'd allowed ourselves a day to get to Skye, 2 days in Skye itself and then a day to get back to Edinburgh with the car - 3 nights in Skye in total. As we had a car, we weren't wedded to any particular town in Skye for accommodation so managed to find ourselves somewhere we liked the look of at a decent price for the Isle. With the car booked, everything was set!
We hired a car, a little Citroen C3 - compact and maneuverable, but roomy enough for me in the drivers seat and zippy enough that we wouldn't have problems on the hills. We picked it up in central Edinburgh, drove it to St Andrews (as detailed in the last post) and the next day carried on from St Andrews. Our route took us through Dundee, Perth, then up the route that we pretty much rode along on the train when we went to Aviemore for Christmas. We stopped for lunch at a roadside cafe on the way, and detoured via Fort William to get fuel before carrying on up to Fort Augustus, so that Sasha could see Loch Ness - just the bottom end of it, but Loch Ness nonetheless! From Fort Augustus to Kyle of Lochalsh we had a few stops as we saw various bits of scenery we thought worth taking photos of, in among the grey skies or the rain - yes, this is close to what passes Summer in Scotland! At Kyle of Lochalsh we visited the supermarket there and got ourselves some supplies for the coming days, as we didn't know what the supermarkets might be like in Skye. As it happens, we managed to grab a whole heap of heavily marked-down chuckout items so it was definitely worth our while!
From Kyle of Lochalsh, you cross a bridge over the waterway to the Isle of Skye. We still had nearly an hour's drive ahead of us to where we were staying on the Island, but we got to see some of the various scenery along the way and get a bit of our bearings. Once off the main road, many of the roads narrow down to a single lane and have passing bays for vehicles to pass each other. After a big day of driving, we were there!
We stayed at a backpackers called the Skyewalker Hostel, where we had a private room with two bunks and use of the shared bathroom. It was located in Portnalong, which was little more than a group of houses, the hostel, a church and a pub - with a little wharf for fishing boats at the bottom of the hill. It wasn't near any of the more major towns, but it was closer to some of the various attractions around Skye and it was a very charming and useful place to stay. Everyone was friendly, the staff sociable and hospitable, and outside was a big glass dome where you could go sit in some warmth, socialise with others over a couple of drinks while looking at the night sky - if there wasn't any cloud hiding the sky, which there was for 2 of our 2 night's stay! One of the owners of the Hostel also was quite sociable and was talking to the various guests and was dishing out drams of Whisky as well! How's that for hospitality!
One of Skye's biggest billed attractions is a thing called the Fairy Pools, a really nice looking area with a pool of turquoise waters coming from a waterfall. This is what the photos all showed, anyway. We went there early in the morning of our first big exploring day as we were hoping to beat the crowds - apparently the place can get quite overrun and is hard to photograph. The weather was a little inclement, and after crossing a river with some large stones for stepping stones we reached another river with group of small waterfalls along the river as we kept along the path towards the big waterfall. The river flattened off and the path petered out to a very small trail - it seemed that there was no big waterfall, that the photos showed one of the smaller falls. But which one? None of them looked like the iconic photo, and with all the rain the water was a little bit churny and there wasn't much turquoise going on. In the end we decided it mustn't be the day for it, and headed on elsewhere.
At the end of the next day though we made a point of returning to the pools, armed with the iconic photo and in better weather too - it wasn't raining, it wasn't exactly sunny either but on the whole it seemed like a better crack at it all. We reached the river with the stepping stones, only to find the river had swollen more and the stepping stones were now under the water a wee way - enough that your whole shoe could get wet, especially with the current and with Sasha's shoes not having great grip, I didn't think it was wise for either of us to cross there if there was an alternative. Even sheep were having trouble crossing the gap, but further downstream other people were crossing and Sasha and I found a spot to cross at, which wasn't great and had sodden muddy bank edges under the grass but we got across - only to run into crowds of midgies, and have another small stream with boggy bank edges to try and stumble across too. With slightly muddy shoes we made it back to the main path, scoured the Fairly Pools and took lots of photos but failed to find the spot where the iconic photo was taken from. The volume of water must have changed the look of the waterfalls and the pools completely, and the photo itself is a deceptive perspective trick of photography anyway. In the end, we thought we found two locations where the photograph might have been taken, but couldn't completely replicate the geography. We took the same alternative route back to the car, but Sasha ended up having a slip on the muddy riverbank when she hesitated to jump for the stepping stone and then rolled into the mud a bit more! So it was a disappointed, and somewhat muddy pair of us who returned to the car, knowing we'd given the pools our best crack but that they were partly false advertising anyway.
The "Capital" of Skye is the largest town, Portrush. We had lunch here on our first big explore day and on the second day came back to visit their large supermarket as well as get more petrol for the car. While its the largest town, its still not very big and we were able to wander around its main streets and park in a fairly short amount of time. We visited the information center here, as well as had lunch but mostly what we will remember Portrush for was the Local Market in the community hall. We thought we'd just have a look to see what it might be like, but there was actually quite a good range of homemade items for sale and some of it looked quite professional. Our big purchase from here though was a butter knife for 50p - we'd been carrying around some plastic cutlery during our trip to have with our various meals, the spoons and forks were generally faring well but it was the plastic knives which were always breaking in our bags. With a bunch of the trip to go, and with a small outlay we thought it was a good idea to purchase this butter knife so that we could guarantee we'd have a knife when we needed one! Also, when we left the market we disturbed a bunny rabbit which had been cleaning itself in the middle of the church carpark and it went and hid behind the only car in the park!
Skye has a single Whisky distillery - Talisker, and it was located in Carbost which was just down the hill from Portree where we were staying. They do tours around the distillery, but we've done a bunch of that sort of thing already - and while the tour did include some tastings at the end, we would much rather just do the tasting and not the tour. There seemed to be no information online or at the distillery about whether you could just do tastings or not, so Sasha went up and asked - yes, you can do tastings for free was the answer! So we chose 4 of the 6 Whiskies they had available for tasting, and tried them. The older, more expensive ones had more depth of flavour to them but personally I found the taste difficult to reconcile with the description of each! Nevertheless, they were good and I'd recommend Talisker and its tastings to anyone.
So we covered quite a bit of the Isle of Skye - virtually circumnavigating the entire Isle over two days, as much as its possible to do so. Up past the Old Man of Stor, a craggy rock formation (but we didn't climb up to it); the waterfall at Kilt Rock; the Fairy Hills near the Quiraing, the Vintage Museum near Uig, a look around Dunvegan (but didn't visit the Castle there), a big walk around at Neist Point, the western-most point of the Isle (where we were able to climb up a very high rock, which dropped away to the sea fairly dramatically); Elgol to see a view up the Black Cullins (a group of Mountains); a walk to a view of the Glenbrittle Waterfall (the tallest on the Island, but we didn't walk to the waterfall's top nor bottom); a visit to Armadale and a Eco-Park they had there, but sadly no otters to be seen; and around to Tarskavaig, where the dipping and diving road tightly surrounded by bush and trees did not allow for much of a view of what might be coming from the other direction on the single-lane road! There was not too much of the Isle left untravelled by us at the end of it all, and our traipsing around the Island finished at the little harbour at Portree where we watched the sun set below the horizon (as we got annoyed by midgies). After, we hopped in the car, and drove up towards the hostel - only to notice the sun had appeared above the horizon again as the change in elevation along the road has been quicker than the sun was setting! So we got another brief sunset.
So there's a bit of farmlife on Skye. Some of it is normal cattle, but some of it is the much larger, much hairier and much more imposing looking Highland Cows ("Coo's"). There was one Highland Cow that we kept seeing near Carbost, which we were sure was a bull at first by its bulk until we spotted its udder and realise it wasn't a male! We nicknamed her Morag, because that seemed a fitting Scottish name and there was a very bullish, brash red-headed character from Home and Away once upon a time with the same name.
The sheep were interesting too. They looked very odd at first and I wondered if they were all feral or strays, but after a while we noticed that they were in general in farms if somewhat free-ranging. The biggest thing was their scraggly wool - some of it just seemed to hang off them, like they'd been rubbing it off and hadn't been shorn. After a bit of research, we discovered this was indeed the case - the sheep on Skye are farmed for their meat and not their wool, and they are a breed of sheep which doesn't grow wool at a fast rate and doesn't need shearing. It seems to be very low maintenance farming - almost like you just let the sheep take care of themselves wandering wherever they like, until you go find them and get them for their meat!
One thing I didn't get to see was one of the Scottish Wildcats, which are present on the Island. We did see a number of cats, one was a lovely fluffy thing which prevented our car from being parked in a good place at the spot we happened upon it, and another notable one was as we were leaving Skye for the last time a cat decided to run out in front of the car in a fairly fast speed zone. Luckily despite the cat getting spooked mid-road and freezing not sure which way to run, I was able to safely brake and avoid the cat, though it was a close thing.
Enough of the Fauna - for Flora, I can say that I have now seen a Scottish Thistle in the wild!
By and large while on Skye, we cooked for ourselves in the very spacious and well equipped kitchen in the Hostel, or otherwise had breakfast from supplies and lunch was often food that we'd obtained for cheap from the supermarkets. But we did eat out - in Portrush we had lunch at a local venue that Sasha had looked up, and ended up getting a rather hearty meal of a half-lobster and chips each - with a cup of Cullen Skink soup to go with it as well. It would seem Cullen Skink isn't so easy to find on the menu in places in Scotland, and usually its more of a "winter" dish but here we were, having it in summer - but it wasn't exactly balmy outside! The lobster was locally caught and was quite delicious, though it was a bit of a challenge to get some of the flesh out of the shell! We also had a coffee and a slice in Dunvegan as I needed a bit of a boost after a bunch of driving and with more to go.
As for drink, there was the hostel dram's of Whisky as well as the tastings at Talisker, but we would otherwise get a bottle of red wine to have with dinner and for afterwards while socialising in the Sky Dome outside. We even got given some wine to drink by a generous Aussie who was leaving the next day and needed to get rid of it - it was a bottle more expensive than we would have bothered buying as well! And lastly, while in Scotland you have to have their national drink - Irn Bru!
Summing Up
The museum with its little thatch-rooved cottages wasn't a recreation, but an actual grouping of buildings that a family had once called home when living on the Isle. Skye is a pretty barren place, and forging a life on the Isle must have been a very hard existence - especially before the road bridge was built and all supplies had to come by ferry. There are still ferries to Skye, either connecting Skye to the mainland or providing a link through Skye to some of the other Isles. Some of those Isles separate Skye from the open Atlantic, so if Skye is barren in its sheltered little place between other Isles and the mainland, how rough must it be on those other Isles?
Skye was the last big thing on our UK list. The Lake District is something we never got to do, but it was something that fell out of our favour even while we were in the UK and we were not so keen on trying to fit it in to any other trip or our End-Of Travels. Scotland's definitely got a different kind of character than Wales or England, and even Ireland - though to me it would be closer in character to Ireland than the other two on the same Island. Would Skye be my favourite part of Scotland? I would say yes, though I very much do like Edinburgh a lot. Both Skye and Edinburgh are really polar opposites of each other on the spectrum, but both ooze a lot of character.
When all is said and done, Sasha and I have covered a very hefty portion of Scotland, a country-within-a-country - but there is a lot more to still try and explore one day. The question for me is whether the next time I visit Scotland, will it still be a part of the UK or will it be its own independent country? When I arrived in the UK at the beginning of my OE, I was very much of the opinion that Scotland would be better staying part of the UK. As time has gone on, even before Brexit my position changed and I really feel Scotland would do better as its own entity - with Brexit making this even moreso. The owner of the hostel we stayed in on Skye was pro-independence, and though many incredulous hostel guests quizzed him on how that could possibly happen and what the ramifications would be, all of his answers were very sensible and reasonable. Definitely a lot of the Scots are under no illusion how independence might affect them, both good and bad but ultimately see more positives for independence than negatives. I have to agree, and I don't think it will be long before they will get a second chance to unshackle the Unicorn from the British Crown - and I hope they succeed.