Sound of Sleat, Skye & Kyle of Lochalsh
There was a brisk wind whipping across Loch Nevis as we left Inverie, but turning north up the Sound of Sleat with wind and current astern, we were soon surfing north on an exhilarating rollercoaster. It was Wagnerian in its splendor: rolling black clouds rent by the wind, shafts of brilliant light catching moor, cliff and mountain, the sea cuffed into pewter surges inlaid with silver.
All this moving water swirls round at the head of the Sound then accelerates through the narrows at Kylerhea into one headlong dash between Skye and the mainland. This chokepoint also brings a daily supply of fast food as the fish run the rapids, and gulls, skuas, gannets and seals were all feasting in wind-whipped whirlpools.
Making our turn under the new bridge, we came alongside beside the buffers of the railway from Inverness, now a little forlorn since the closure of the ferry. Our afternoon would see us cross the bridge to view the extraordinary landscape of the Isle of the Skye, a magnet for mountain walkers. To either side of the coach the aptly named Red and Black Cuillins, sea lochs, peat bogs and heather moors, the latter now in full color and glistening in intermittent afternoon sunshine. We spent an hour or so at Portree, historic capital of the island, picture postcard fishing village and market centre. The romance of the Jacobites had, needless to say, followed us ‘over the sea to Skye’.
This was Flora MacDonald’s native heath, the doughty heroine who had effected the escape of Bonnie Prince Charlie after Culloden and who had been given a lock of the Prince’s hair at Portree in the MacNab Inn. A memorial plaque to her in St Columba’s church in the town recorded a further exploit of hers. She had married an army Captain and travelled with him to America where he fought for the British against the American colonial rebels. Returning to Scotland in 1779, their ship was attacked by French privateers and it was Flora who organized the defense. She had thus risked her life for two rival dynasties, the Houses of Stuart and of Hanover, for precious little personal gain.
Fond farewells were said at our evening dinner where the Address to the Haggis was admirably declaimed by our National Geographic Expert, Jim Russell, to the strains of a local piper, and consumed with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
