On Skye I found my first one lane roads, just wide enough
for one vehicle to fit at a time with dips at the side marked “Passing Place.”
Whether you’re in a very wide American car with the wheel on the wrong side, or
a smaller car with the wheel on the right, can make quite a difference to the
journey you experience. The busses I took, however, went along the main road
between Broadford, Portree and Uig, and it seemed that these roads were
cleverly designed to fit two vehicles at one time.
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| Portree harbour |
Portree is a beautiful little town. It’s just the right
size, neither too large nor too small, and looks across Loch Portree and the
Sound of Rassay and shapely hills and headlands. I had gorgeous sun,
interspersed though it was with rain, that highlighted the shapes in the land
and the smoothness of the harbour. The houses looked dry and inviting, and the little
fishing boats caught in that moment between one half of business and the other.
I was delighted to be so delighted by Portree, because it’s here that some of
my Stewart ancestors come from.
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| On my walk around the headland |
The Gaelic name is “Port Righ,” the King’s Port, and it’s
easy to see on a purely aesthetic basis why a King would want to claim such a
place, even if it was (reputedly) only a visitation by James V that gave it its
name. The use of Gaelic names is something I haven’t yet noted – throughout
Scotland, both the native and the English language are used for place names on
road signs and often on parts of information boards about sites. On the Isle of
Lewis, I found that English was given the smaller font, and sometimes didn’t
have a font at all. The ferries also have their English messages cushioned in
the native tongue. It’s quite nice.
I left my nice wool and possum hat on the bus and dropped
off my luggage at the Bayfield Backpackers hostel, then walked back along the
road out of town towards the Aros Centre, which contains a cinema and many
Scottish-themed items for sale, but also has an exhibition about sea eagles.
Sea eagles once populated the islands but like other predatory animals (wolves
and bears, for example) were hunted down to nothing. A programme has been
running for decades now to reintroduce sea eagles from, I believe, Norway, and
has started to meet some success. There is a nest about a mile for Portree, and
there have been sightings around the place – even in Ullapool.
Sadly, I saw no
eagles on my trip, but I did have a long chat with the fellow there about New
Zealand birds and conversation in both countries. He was also interested to
hear I came from the Portree Stewart line, and remembered there was a large
house that had been owned by two Stewart brothers. I wasn’t able to locate the building, nor to find any
Stewarts in the graveyard along the roadside. I did find a man declared ‘Seaforth
Highlander,’ with the MacKenzie stag crest embossed on his stone. I found it a
nice touch that all the headstones faced towards the loch, giving the dead a
prime view even when it might be more inconvenient for the living to read the
stones.
The late afternoon took me, through the same startling sun
and bursts of rain, along the headland, above black rocks and up a steep
hillside beside farmland. The shadow of a hill fell just on the borderline of a
stone fence, as if it somehow formed a boundary for the light. It hailed on me,
very hard. I think two great tits tried to warn me, fluttering about in
branches near my head with their blue and yellow feathers. The weather cleared
and the rabbits came out in force to absorb the golden light. The best views, I
think, came on a path I took out away from Portree for just a short while, on the
top of farmland hills, from which I could see everything. It reminded me, just
a little, of our hill at home.
The next morning I caught the bus to Uig, where the ferry to
Tarbert leaves. I had enough time to wander around in the rain – up a hill road
with views across farmland and the overcast harbour, through the little
community wood with a double-step waterfall at the end, to the Faerie Glade of
small and strange land formations. There are conical hills and a protruding
peak of rock and turf. Around it people have arranged stones. There even seems
to be a miniature Pet Semetary, the stones in a spiral and the bone of a sheep
placed in the middle.
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| Odd formations. Must be faeries again. |
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| Spot the Semetary cricle |
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| Waterfall in Uig |
One enjoyment I've found, which I’d heard travellers found but hadn’t really
considered, has been meeting people in passing. In Broadford, two chaps from
Italy arrived late to occupy the other two beds in my room. They had driven up
from Edinburgh in a hired car, and had part of the following day to drive
around Skye before heading towards the Orkneys. Two weeks, they had, to do an
insane amount of driving around Scotland and England. We went for dinner at the
only place still open at 11 on a Saturday night in Broadford (which they most
unexpectedly and kindly paid for), trying to describe animals we’d seen to work
out the names for them in our languages, and working on my Italian phrases of
which I knew and still know none. They
were particularly interested in the average income in NZ, the comparative price
of renting an apartment, and purchasing a NZ$20 bill for ten pounds to add to
their currency collection. In Portree I met a girl with the same name as me.
She was also travelling alone, had delegated herself two months, had left
behind a boyfriend with an Irish name she’d been dating for just over a year
and a half, and loved Scotland. She was an artist from Oregon.
Skye is quite stunning. The landscape is so varied, and
there is a lot that I didn’t see. There are certainly limitations to not having
your own transport on Skye, and I think that next time I come – for I will – I
will aim to have a vehicle at my disposal.
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| Rook |
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