The Long Way to Skye

Clara wanted to take the train to Kyle of Lochalsh. I wanted to drive, mainly so that we could stop wherever we liked, and since I had done all the planning, I won. We left Edinburgh on a Thursday morning in fog so thick that Stirling Castle never appeared at all.

The fog was still lying in the glens when we cut across to the north shore of Loch Tay. Dead trees stood up out of it like a stand of masts, and the grass beneath had already gone the colour of old rope. Clara said it looked like the end of a novel. I said it looked like the start of one, and we argued about which novel all the way to Crianlarich.

By Bridge of Orchy the sky had broken open. The moor around the River Orchy was every shade between straw and rust, with dark plantation squared off against it on the far slope. Then the road climbs onto Rannoch Moor itself, where there is nothing much except water, rock and sky, and Loch Bà spreads out in pieces below the viewpoint. A single rowan by the lay-by had turned scarlet. Three coaches had stopped there, and every passenger was photographing that one tree.

Glen Coe arrives suddenly. One minute you are on the open moor, the next the walls have closed in and the road is threading between them. It is a beautiful place with a terrible history, the massacre of 1692, and it never quite lets you forget that. We walked up beside the river to an old stone bridge and a beehive cairn, under a sky that kept changing its mind, and came back with soaked trousers to the knee.

The calmest hour of the whole trip was at Glencoe Lochan, above the village, a small loch ringed with conifers planted more than a century ago by a landowner whose wife was homesick for Canada. The birches were yellow, the water held the whole hillside upside down, and a heron stood motionless at the far end long enough for us to decide it was a decoy. It wasn’t.

From Fort William it is a long, winding drive west through Glen Shiel. We reached Eilean Donan just as the low sun caught the stone. Most of the castle is a twentieth-century rebuild, which bothers some people. It didn’t bother us.

On Skye we stayed near Broadford, below the rounded Red Cuillin, their slopes already gone tawny for the winter, and drove the single-track road towards Elgol past the ruined church at Kilchrist, stopping every few hundred yards because Clara kept seeing another view.

Further north, though, the island was greener than I expected. Up on Trotternish the grass was still almost summer-bright, and the Quiraing, a long landslip of cliffs and pinnacles, looked frankly too much in the afternoon light. The next day we drove out to Neist Point, the westernmost corner of the island, and watched rain cross the sea towards the lighthouse like a curtain being drawn.

We came home the other way, along Loch Ness, on the theory that Urquhart Castle might be quiet in October. It was not, quite, but the birches on the far shore were gold, and the A9 home felt like a short drive after a week of single-track roads.