A RUGGED BUT RAINY BEAUTY
Hiking trip to the Outer Hebrides and Skye years in the works and well worth the wait
After many years of talking about hiking in the Outer Hebrides with my friend of more than 45 years, Rich (we're both of Scottish descent), we finally did it in October 2019.
After much research, we booked our trip through Wilderness Scotland, which organizes guided hikes for parties up to of a maximum of eight people.
Our trip started in Inverness and began with an early morning walk along the banks of the River Ness, before heading up to the station to meet our guide for the next six days.
The rest of our group comprised one gentleman from Brazil and three ladies from the U.S. Also joining Ken, our guide, was Bridget, who also works for Wilderness Scotland.
We piled in the van and headed out of Inverness, travelling southwest along Loch Ness (no Nessie sightings) and stopped off at Eilean Donan Castle, which was founded in the13th century and was open to visitors during the tourist season, but is a residential home for the balance of the year.
From there, we travelled across the bridge over to the Isle of Skye, driving through the town of Broadford, en route to a stop for our first hike at Glen Sligachan.
This was a nice gentle hike flanked on one side by the Red Cuillin, which is mainly granite, and on the other by the Black Cuillin, which is igneous-based and very popular with climbers. After our hike (mostly in sunshine with the odd shower that made for spectacular rainbows) we moved on to our stop for the night at the Stein Inn on the Waternish, which is on the northwest tip of Skye.
We woke up the next morning to howling winds and lashing horizontal rain! This meant abandoning our scheduled hike to the Quiraing (too dangerous in this weather) in favour of a more sheltered hike, known as the Two Churches walk near Dunvegan Castle.
The first part of the walk was through a sheltered woodland, but then broke out in the last kilometre to a high exposed area. It proved to be quite the challenge and was completed by hiking up to the “Standing Rock,” which is a man-made structure at the top of a hill created to commemorate the new millennium, but using the same techniques that would have been used by our ancestors thousands of years ago.
After a nice hot chocolate at a local cafe, we went across to visit Dunvegan Castle, which is a somewhat unique castle in Scotland as it has been owned by the Mcleod family for more than 500 years and the current family continues to live there during the non-tourist season.
We then made a group decision to forgo our planned second hike, given the appalling conditions, and elected to go to a local pub instead.
So, after a short detour to Skye's biggest town of Portree, we carried on to the Edibane Inn where they have local session musicians who drop in and play every Sunday afternoon. En route to the pub, Ken regaled us with an appropriate poem to describe the day:
It rained and rained and rained and rained, The average was well maintained; And when our fields were simply bogs, It started raining cats and dogs. After a drought of half an hour, There came a most refreshing shower; And then the queerest thing of all, A gentle rain began to fall.
Next day 'twas pretty fairly dry, Save for a deluge from the sky. This wetted people to the skin, But after that the rain set in. We wondered what's the next we'd get, As sure as fate we got more wet. But soon we'll have a change again, And we shall have …. A drop of rain
There was very little wind and no rain the next morning, so we reverted back to the plan to visit and hike the Quirang. This is a spectacular piece of coastal scenery on the northern part of Skye and was formed by a number of massive landslips which left various large pieces of rock on the landscape that are quite unique.
Some of these have been given names depicting their appearance – “The Needle,” “The Table” and “The Castle,” for example. The rock structure at the Quirang is still moving, as evidenced by a fairly sizable rock that came careering down the mountain as we were hiking.
We then made our way a short distance to the little town of Uig, which is where the ferry goes from for the crossing from Skye to Tarbert on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, which was the focal point of our trip. After a two-hour ferry ride, we headed to a beautiful beach and surrounds of Luskentyre and enjoyed a lovely hike before heading on to our accommodation for the next four nights — the aptly named Hotel Hebrides.
The next day we headed south on Harris to Northton Machair on the coast, which is home to the ruins of a 16th-century monastery. There have also been findings in the area dating back to a settlement of more than 5,000 years ago. It was a nice coastal hike to get to the monastery.
After this hike, we headed back towards Tarbert via the “Golden Road,” a windy 32-kilometre route through amazing moonlike landscape so named because of its cost to construct. It was originally started more than 100 years ago but more properly completed in the 1940s.
We then carried on past Tarbert for a hike alongside the Lacasdail Loch, during which were heard the battle cry of two potentially duelling stags.
The weather the next day was cloudy with sunny breaks, windy but no rain, so we set off as planned northwest to Hushinish, which is a remote area on a peninsula overlooking a beautiful loch and then out to the Atlantic Ocean.
This is a very mountainous area and has few well defined trails and turned out to be, by far, our hardest hike involving lots of steep terrain, rocks and bogs to navigate.
We spent the next couple of hours circumnavigating the loch and encountered severe winds. Rich's glasses blew off while he was trying to get a video, never to be retrieved.
After finding a somewhat sheltered area to eat our packed lunch, we continued round the loch which took us to a huge, magnificent, pristine beach. The colours of the water (ranging from turquoise to almost black) were amazing and the vistas from the beach back to the mountains we'd hiked were stunning.
This was a 12 km, five-hour hike through difficult terrain, but so worth it.
With a forecast of the return of gale force winds for the next day, and the distinct possibility of being stranded in the Outer Hebrides, we made a group decision to move Friday's schedule back to Thursday and replace Thursday's planned hike with one on Friday in the Ullapool area on the mainland.
This revision enabled us to make a detour to visit the Callenik Standing Stones, which are some 5,000 years old and very reminiscent of Stonehenge.
We then carried on to Stornoway, which is the largest town in the Hebrides (population about 8,000). As well as being a major port, it is home to Lews Castle, which dates back to the mid-19th century.
Back to the van and, as it turned out, we were one of only four or five standby vehicles that made it on the ferry. The 2.5hour crossing was very calm and we made it to Ullapool around 5 p.m., by which time the winds were starting to pick up.
The weather on the mainland was not as bad as in the Hebrides (ferries were indeed cancelled) and we headed out for our first
hike of the day to the Bone Caves near Inchnadamph, about a 45-minute drive from Ullapool.
The trail was reasonably good and ran alongside a fast moving creek set on limestone, which is unusual in this part of the world. The trail steepened at the end and led to a series of caves partway up the mountain. We saw several deer en route. The weather cooperated all the
way up (windy, but dry) but briefly poured as we started our descent, which was particularly narrow and steep in places.
After lunch, on the patio of our guide Ken's house, we moved on to our final hike of the trip – a gentle one-hour walk along the Black River, known as the Silverbridge Riverside. It was beautiful scenery and a nice way to end our trip.