The Fairy Pools were always going to deliver. What defined the day was everything the brochures leave out: mud, midges and cold water.
The pools sit in Coire na Creiche in Glen Brittle, on the Minginish peninsula, in the shadow of the Black Cuillin. The name translates roughly as the corrie of the spoils, and it earned it honestly. This was the site of the last clan battle fought on Skye, in 1601, when the MacDonalds of Sleat defeated the MacLeods and ended a year of feuding between them. Alasdair MacLeod and around thirty of his kinsmen were captured in a fight that ran from late afternoon into the night. The Privy Council eventually forced a settlement, and the peace was sealed with three weeks of feasting at Dunvegan Castle, which is a detail I enjoyed all the more having stood inside Dunvegan just yesterday. Standing there now, watching a few hundred people in rain jackets picking their way up a path, it takes some effort to put the two versions of the place together.
Getting there was the usual Skye business. Slow, spectacular, and punctuated by regular pulls into laybys to let oncoming traffic through. Single track roads reward patience and punish hurry, and by day nine we had made our peace with that.
The hard part was passing the Talisker distillery at Carbost. Talisker has been working since 1830 and is the oldest operating distillery on Skye, and it happens to be one of my favourite whiskies. I sat at the junction doing the mental arithmetic every parent knows. One person in this vehicle gets something out of that stop, and it is not the six year old. So we pushed on to the thing that was for all of us. Next time I am pulling in.
The Fairy Pools were effectively unnamed and unvisited as a destination until quite recently. Then the internet happened. The numbers are worth sitting with. In 2006 the site drew around 13,000 visitors. By 2015 that had climbed to 82,000. By 2019 it was more than 180,000. That is a fourteen fold increase inside thirteen years, on a single track road in a glen with no village attached to it, and it explains both the substantial car park you now pay to use and the state of the path in places. None of that is a reason not to go. It is a reason to know what you are walking into.
The signage says twenty minutes, and that is accurate in the narrowest possible sense. Twenty minutes gets you to the first pool. What it does not tell you is that the burn runs a long way back toward the Cuillin, and that every hundred metres or so there is another falls that looks better, wilder and more photogenic than the one you just stopped at. So you keep going. Then you keep going again. Budget far more time than the sign suggests, and wear boots you do not mind ruining. Long sections of the track were mud and standing water the day we walked it, and the going was slow.
The weather was not one of Scotland's showpiece days. Low grey cloud, a genuine chill in the air, and rain arriving in short bursts every little while. It suited the place.
About three quarters of the way up, the wind dropped, and that was that. Highland midges are largely grounded by even a light breeze, which is why a windy day on Skye can feel completely midge free and a still one can be unbearable. When the air went calm they came up off the wet ground in numbers, and this was easily the worst we copped on the whole trip. The face nets went on, probably a few minutes later than they should have. The backup technique was swatting yourself repeatedly with a towel, which if you have ever watched a horse work its tail, you can picture accurately.
They went hardest at Mirin, who came away with a scatter of little red bites across her face. What impressed us was that neither she nor Katherine complained once, about the midges, the mud or the rain. Both girls just got on with it, which after the Old Man of Storr two days earlier was starting to look like a pattern.
We had towels with us because some of us were going in. The Fairy Pools are famous for a vivid aqua colour that depends heavily on light and recent rainfall. Ours were not aqua that day. What they were, reliably, was cold. The water comes straight off the Cuillin and sits somewhere around 8 to 11 degrees in summer, which is enough to take your breath in the first few seconds.
Mirin entered cautiously and stood in it with me, held her ground for a respectable stretch, then sensibly called it. I was not ready to leave it there, so I got into one of the pools in swimming shorts and stood under a waterfall. At which point a tourist somewhere behind me, European accent, called out that I should stop mucking about and actually go in.
So I did.
There is a moment right after full immersion where your body stops arguing and something else takes over. It goes from shocking to thrilling in about fifteen seconds, and then it is simply one of the best things you can do with your morning. By the time I climbed out the difference between the water and the air had me so warm that I walked the fifty minutes back to the car with my shirt off, in a Scottish drizzle, entirely comfortable.
Here is the part that stayed with me. In the few hours we spent up that glen, not a single other visitor got into the water. Not one. I understand why. It is cold, the weather was poor, and most people were carrying a phone and a day pack rather than a towel. But a lot of those people had flown a very long way to stand next to that water, some of them, like us, from the other side of the planet. Get in. You may never come back this way.
We had thought about stopping again at Sligachan Old Bridge, which we had considered also on the day we first arrived on the island. It was still swarming with people. Unless you are there very early or very late that place gives you no peace at all, and it is a cheap tick in the box, so we drove on.
Instead we doubled back west to Café Cùil, above Loch Harport near Carbost, easy to spot under its bright red roof. It had been on our list for months on the strength of its reviews and it did not disappoint. Gill is a vegetarian and is still talking about the tomato soup and the basil and mozzarella toastie she had here. Simple food, done properly. She rates it among the best meals she has ever had. Put it on your list.
Fort William and Ben Nevis tomorrow.
