IN THE SHADOW OF SKYE
Right next to Scotland’s superstar island yet barely noticed: meet the backing singers that deserve a lot more attention.
The jig-worthy hill
The Fairy Pools, Quiraing, Old Man of Storr, Black Cuillin: places on the Isle of Skye look just as magical as those names suggest, as the rocks hurtle up in all kinds of rub-your-eyes shapes. But those shapes draw crowds, often big crowds, while drifting just offshore are more islands – spectacular islands – where few seem to go.
The closest is the long rocky strip of Raasay, which stretches 14 miles by three. It lies between Skye and the mainland’s Applecross Peninsula, wedged snugly in the Sound of Raasay like a cargo ship in the Suez Canal. And when James Boswell and Samuel Johnson toured the Hebrides in 1773 Boswell danced a jig at the top of the island, on the summit of Dùn Caan. It’s easy to see why. At 1457 feet (444m) it’s no giant but as the solitary high lump on Raasay, the view is vast. It bumps up and down over Applecross across the water, spikes sharply across the Red and Black Cuillin on Skye, then flows along the length of that island’s Trotternish ridge to a wedge of open sea. You might get dizzy as you try and decide which way to look. The island’s own landscape is glorious too, tapering north in a ribbon of rock so diverse and ancient it makes geologists jig for joy, and plummeting east over cliffs to a shelf of green turf and a shining loch, with the waves twinkling below.
This flat-capped hill – once a fiery volcano – is readily climbed by way of the Burma Road (named for the jungle the forestry workers hacked through to build it) and moorland paths from the island’s port at Clachan, which is just a 25-minute ferry ride from Sconser on Skye. Out and back to the top of Dùn Caan is nine miles but a longer, tougher, return leads down the steep eastern scarp to the ruins of Hallaig. Once the isle’s largest settlement, it was cleared in the mid 19th-century to make way for sheep farming and is the subject of Raasay-born poet Sorley MacLean’s most famous poem: ‘I will go down to Hallaig, to the Sabbath of the dead, where the people are frequenting, every single generation gone.’
A drove road once used by villagers leads to North Fearns, then paths and narrow lanes take you round the isle’s southern shores to return to the main village of Inverarish and nearby port. The most famous road on Raasay is up north though, at the end of the single thread of tarmac that runs nine miles up the island. The last 1¾ miles from Brochel Castle to Arnish are known as Calum’s Road, cut from the rock and bog almost single-handedly by Calum MacLeod using pick, shovel and barrow, and a copy of Road Making & Maintenance: A Practical Treatise for Engineers, Surveyors and Others.
For years islanders had campaigned for the road to be extended, hoping better connections might stop the depopulation of the north, but the council refused – so Calum stepped in. It took a decade of hard graft around his other jobs as crofter, postman, and lighthouse-keeper on Rona, but by 1974 Calum had engineered almost two miles, which the council eventually surfaced some years later. It wasn’t the only route he forged here: through the winters of 1949-1952 Calum and his brother built a path from Torran to Craig an Eòin, earning £35 a season. You can still follow their cleverly engineered route and when the tide is out you can keep on across the seaweed strewn causeway to the even quieter, uninhabited island of Eilean Fladday.
WALK HERE: Download Dùn Caan at walk1000miles.co.uk/bonusroutes MORE INFO: See Caledonian MacBrayne (calmac.co.uk) for ferry details and raasay.com for the island.
“The peaks of the Rum Cuillin pierce the waves like the fins of circling sharks, the remains of a supervolcano ” that may once have been 10,000 feet high.
The Other Cuillin
Skye isn’t the only Scottish island with a range of fang-tastic mountains called the Cuillin. Away to the south, and big in the view from Skye, the peaks of the Rùm Cuillin pierce the waves like the fins of circling sharks, the remains of a supervolcano that may once have been 10,000 feet high. 60 million years of wind, rain and ice have worn it down below 3000 feet, while chiselling the island’s 40 square miles into a thrilling spectacle – or what geologist John MacCulloch writing in 1824 described as a ‘heap of rude mountains, scarcely possessing an acre of level land’.
Barkeval, Hallival, Trollabhal, Ainshval and the highest peak of Askival (2664ft/812m) all sound like brutish characters in a Viking saga, and the gnarly names suit. While doing the full traverse of this Cuillin doesn’t involve ropes like its big brother on Skye, it’s plenty steep and airy with hands-on-rock sections. Ticking off Hallival and Barkeval, the two tops nearest the island’s port and only village at Kinloch, is a slightly more straightforward challenge, but if you’d rather goggle at those precipitous angles than scramble up them, a good track leads across the heart of the island to the small bay at Harris, a route through the wilderness that incongruously ends at a Greek-style temple. This is the mausoleum of the Bullough family who bought the island in 1888 and later added an ‘h’ to make the name Rhum, convinced that being the Lairds of Rùm sounded a bit debauched. It’s almost eight miles each way across the island so you might want to bring a tent and wild camp before returning next day, with optional glenhugging detours out to Kilmory Bay or the bothy at Guirdil. And do look for red deer, which outnumber Rùm’s residents 40 to 1.
WALK HERE: Find routes at walkhighlands.co.uk/islands/isle-of-rum.shtml MORE INFO: See calmac.co.uk for ferries to both islands, and isleofrum.com
The inside-out glen
The Rùm supervolcano shaped not only that island, but its neighbour to the south-east. Eigg is dominated by An Sgùrr – seen nose on from the island’s port at Galmisdale it looks like a pillar, side-on like a mile-long wall, and it is in fact a vast plaster cast of a glen. When Rùm erupted it flooded a river valley with lava, but erosion has since worn away the softer basalt slopes of that glen leaving the hard pitchstone inside the valley standing proud. Its vertical columnar sides make it look improbable for a walker, but there is a scalable notch about a third of the way along – briefly hands on but not vertiginous – to track red flashes painted on the rocks along the top to a circular triangulation point at its eastern end. Rarely does a height of just 1289 ft (393m) reward with such huge views or such an acutely airy feeling.
WALK HERE: Turn to Walk 27 in this issue for your An Sgùrr walk MORE INFO: See isleofeigg.org
The most beautiful view
No part of the mainland gets closer to Skye than the Glenelg Peninsula, separated by just 500 metres from the ‘winged isle’ by the fierce tidal race of Kyle Rhea. Reached by a single unclassified road from Shiel Bridge, over the high pass of Mam Ratagan, it sees far fewer visitors than Skye, and the further you go round the peninsula the quieter it gets until the single-track lane gives out entirely at the hamlet of Corran.
Across Loch Hourn lies the great wilderness of Knoydart topped by the exquisite lines of Ladhar Bheinn, and there’s plenty of wild walking on this side of the water too. The Munro (Scottish mountain over 3000 feet) of Beinn Sgritheall rears in a wall to a trio of summits behind the neighbouring village of Arnisdale. The ascent is as steep as it looks and a start at sea-level means you’re climbing every last one of its 3196 feet, as the water of the Allt a’ Mhuilinn guides you up to Bealach Arnasdail and a left turn up what feels like sheer scree to the mountain’s east top, and along a narrowing ridge to the highest central summit – where the view magicks away all the pain. Sir Hugh Munro described it as ‘perhaps the most beautiful I have seen in Scotland’ and writer and adventurer, Hamish Brown, said he would not swap it ‘for any
“The view makes it all worthwhile. Sir Hugh Munro described it as ‘perhaps the most beautiful I have seen in Scotland’”
mountain view in the world’. Hitting on Skye, Knoydart, Mull, Rum, Jura, Moidart, Ben Nevis and Slioch, you can see over 100 named peaks from up there on a clear day. The gradients of the descent are just as testing, sharply down the rocky west ridge to Lochan Bhealach Ràrsaidh, and then diagonally through the woods of Coille Mhialairigh to the loch shore.
There are less leg-shaking routes on the peninsula too. From Corran, a historic herringfishing path traces the shore of Loch Hourn south, an out-and-back along a now little-trodden route with views into Knoydart (and do stop in at
Sheena’s Tea Hut, surely one of the remotest cafés in Britain). Or head back up towards Glenelg and walk out to Sandaig Bay, better known as Camusfearna in Gavin Maxwell’s classic otter tale, Ring of Bright Water, with the Isle of Skye looming what feels like touching-close just across the water.
WALK HERE: Download a Sandaig route at walk1000miles.co.uk/bonusroutes. For Beinn Sgritheall, see walkhighlands.com MORE INFO: See glenelgscotland.com