Day seven of the motorhome loop was the one I had circled since we started planning, and the Trotternish peninsula gave us everything we asked of it.
We took local advice and skipped the backtrack into Portree for coffee, brewing our own on the plunger in the van and driving straight to the Old Man of Storr. Street parking near the trailhead was already filling, and the whole ridge sat under thick fog with the Old Man completely hidden, so plenty of people were weighing up whether it was worth starting at all.
The walk is around five kilometres return with 340 metres of climbing. The lower half is a wide, well made path ending at a gate that has become the unofficial turnaround point. Stand there a while and you will watch most people take their photo and head back down. Above the gate it changes completely, steepening into natural rock stairs that gain height fast. Gill and Mirin settled in to wait while Katherine and I carried on.
Partway up we stopped for a breather on a bluff off the side of the track and I put the drone up. That was when it clicked. We were not looking at the fog anymore, we were inside it, and from up there the pinnacles and the cliffs behind them were visible in a way they never were from the road. Everyone who turned back because the mountain looked closed had it backwards.
While the drone was up we spotted two beanies we recognised working their way up the rock stairs. Mirin had changed her mind and come after us, with Gill alongside her. Later we reflected that we never saw another teenager on the upper trail, let alone a child. The girls were incredible and should be rightly proud of their effort!
We found mountain sheep grazing near the base, then Katherine and I took the last scramble to the Old Man itself. Gill stayed with Mirin at the foot, which was the right call. I went up first, put my hands on that fifty metre column of rock and felt the connection to the place properly. Katherine hung back until I came down and talked her through the safe line, and then she went. Watching her walk up, touch it and turn around beaming is the picture I will keep from this whole trip.
One piece of advice if you are going. Give the Storr four hours, not the two we planned, and go early. The lower trail was packed on our way down.
Kilt Rock was the opposite kind of stop, a car park and a few steps to a ninety metre wall of dolerite columns with Mealt Falls dropping around sixty metres into the Sound of Raasay. Spectacular, and jostling for a photo spot, which is exactly why I prefer the ones you have to work for.
Lunch was The Hungry Gull at Staffin, with a quoted wait of 45 to 60 minutes. There is not a lot else up that end of Skye, so we settled in, and an impatient American group ahead of us gave up and halved our wait. Worth every minute. The place is all mismatched second hand furniture and interesting art, closer to an antique shop than a cafe, and the food matched the room. A burger piled with bacon and melted cheese in a soft roll, a bowl of chunky roast potatoes, a proper tomato soup, and a genuinely good vegetarian plate for Gill with broccolini and toasted almonds. Bottles of Thistly Cross, the Scottish cider from East Lothian, in original and elderflower. Colouring sheets kept Mirin busy. Katherine declared it the best burger she has ever had, which is becoming a habit.
We lost the dinosaur footprints at An Corran to rain and a full parking area, then spent a memorable stretch gridlocked on a single track road near Uig with a 32 tonne truck, a French woman gesturing magnificently at the camper ahead of us, and a queue of vehicles reversing several hundred metres around a bend. The driver was adamant that some Scottish law obliged us to give way and offered to reverse vans for us (which wasn't needed), which was brilliant theatre, even after learning later that no such law exists.
The Fairy Glen finished the day. It is a strange, miniature landscape of grassy cones and stepped terraces, part of the same enormous landslip that created the Storr and the Quiraing, and standing in it the scale feels wrong in the best way. Tiny doors had been built into a few of the hillsides, which fed straight into Mirin's fairy quest and had her hunting fairy houses all afternoon. Katherine and I had concocted the whole thing between us, a three part run across our three days on Skye, and this was stage one. The fairy flag at Dunvegan Castle comes next, then the Fairy Pools to finish. Katherine came up the narrow squeeze onto the ledge at Castle Ewen with me, an exposed perch with nothing to stop you on any side, and worth the care it takes to get there.
Waternish peninsula tomorrow.
