The Quiraing & Dunvegan, Isle of Skye, Scotland

We’d yet to see the north of Skye, so we motored through Skye’s largest town, Portree, and on up the Trotternish Peninsula to the coastal village of Staffin.  We passed two heavily laden backpackers on foot and stopped to ask them where they were headed.  “To the Quiraing”, they said.  This is a spectacular rock formation caused by massive landslides millions of years ago – we intended to go there sometime, so we offered to take them now.  They were a French couple from Lyon intending to camp and walk in the Quiraing for several days, and they were well-equipped with some very heavy duty cameras and lenses.

We said goodbye in the car park at the top of a long, steep, winding road and set out on our own walk for a couple of hours amongst the fantastic landforms perched high above the ocean.  Later, at Kilmuir on the other side of the peninsula, we inspected the memorial to the brave Flora MacDonald who risked her own life in the early 1700s to help Bonnie Prince Charlie escape from the pursuing English, and some old Scottish crofter houses displayed at the interesting Museum of Island Life. 

The following day we drove around the Waternish Peninsula, passing Dunvegan Castle, the home of the Chiefs of the MacLeod clan for 800 years.  In Dunvegan village we looked through the museum devoted to the life and exploits of Angus MacAskill, the world’s largest recorded healthy, non-obese, man.  Angus was born on the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides in 1825 and grew into a giant, seven feet nine inches tall, weighing 425 pounds and with a chest measurement of 80 inches.  He was extremely strong and his feats of strength became legendary in Cape Breton, Canada, where the family had emigrated when Angus was six years old. In his mid twenties he embarked on a five year theatrical tour throughout North America to display his colossal stature, a venture that made him an affluent man.  Although quiet by nature and a devout Presbyterian, Angus enjoyed the occasional tipple and once jokingly walked into a tavern, picked up a 140 gallon whisky barrel, and drank through the bung hole.  We ended the day with our own wee dram of single malt at the Talisker distillery near Carbost in central Skye, following an interesting tour of the whisky production process.