Skye and the Small Isles - The Rough Guide to Scottish Highlands and Islands - page 280

The views across to Raasay and Rona from the first stage of the path can be spectacular.
The coast here is worth exploring, too, especially the track leading to Rubha nam
Brathairean (Brothers' Point).

5

Kilt Rock
Off the A855, southeast of Sta n
With spectacular tubular, basalt columns that plummet sheer into the sea - like
the folds in a kilt, apparently - and cliffs dotted with fulmar and kittiwake, it's
little surprise Kilt Rock is a popular call on the tourist route. A waterfall which falls
170ft to the sea only adds to the appeal. The car park is a few miles north of the
Lealt Falls turn.

Quiraing
Just past Staffin Bay, a single-track road cuts east across the peninsula into the
Quiraing , a spectacular area of rock pinnacles, sheer cliffs and strange rock
formations produced by rock slips. There are two car parks : from the first, beside a
cemetery, it's a steep half-hour climb to the rocks; from the second, on the saddle,
it's a longer but more gentle traverse. Once you're among the rocks, you can make
out “The Prison” to your right, and the 131ft “Needle”, to your left. “The Table”,
a sunken platform where locals used to play shinty, lies a further fifteen-minute
scramble up the rocks.

Duntulm
Beyond Flodigarry, four miles further along the A855, lies DUNTULM (Duntuilm),
whose heyday as a MacDonald power base is recalled by the shattered remains of a
headland fortress abandoned by the clan in 1732; they say a clumsy nurse dropped
the baby son and heir from a window onto the rocks below. They also say you can see
the keel marks of Viking longships scoured into the rocks.

Skye Museum of Island Life
On the A855, 2 miles west of Duntulm • Easter-Oct Mon-Sat 9.30am-5pm • £2.50 • T 01470 552206, W skyemuseum.co.uk
It's a short trip from Duntulm to the best of the island's folk museums. Run by
locals, the Skye Museum of Island Life - an impressive pair of thatched blackhouses
decorated with home furnishings and farming tools - provides an insight into a way
of life commonplace only a century ago. Behind the museum are the graves of
Flora MacDonald , heroine during Bonnie Prince Charlie's flight, and her husband. Such
was her fame the original mausoleum fell victim to souvenir hunters and had to be
replaced. The Celtic cross headstone is inscribed with a tribute by Dr Johnson, who
visited her in 1773: “Her name will be mentioned in history, if courage and fidelity be
virtues mentioned with honour.”

FLORA MACDONALD
Perhaps the strangest moment in the tale of Bonnie Prince Charlie came after the Battle of
Culloden when he fled in a frock disguised as the Irish maid of Flora MacDonald . Born in
South Uist in 1722 to a family sympathetic to the Jacobites, she rowed the fugitive prince
to Skye in 1746. While he fled to France, Flora was arrested en route home and jailed in the
Tower of London, which must have been a shocking experience for a 24-year-old from the
Outer Hebrides. She was already a Highlands heroine when she was released in 1747 and,
back on Skye, went on to have nine children with her new husband, Allan Macdonald.
Samuel Johnson praised her courage and fidelity after his visit in 1773, a year before the
couple emigrated to North Carolina, then Nova Scotia. They returned in 1779 and Flora
died in 1790, back in her old bed, a symbol of Highlands pluck whose funeral attracted a
procession a mile long.