As you can tell immediately by the title, Skye is awesome. I woke this morning to a crisp silver-white sky over the Atlantic, lapping at a stone wall merely two meters from my bedroom window. Across two or three hundred meters you can see another thin peninsula dotted with white cottages, and to the left the Skye Bridge, curving up gracefully from the mainland to touch down nearby.
(^not my photo, obviously)
and it just got better. God, I can’t even remember everything we did today! We were on the bus by 8:30 and drove out to the mountains Red and Black Cullin. On the way we heard about the story behind Saucy Mary; an entrepreneur who used to tax sailors coming into the harbor, and for an extra tax would perform a castle-top striptease. Then Neil told a fantastic tale of Cú Chulainn chasing and fighting a mythical heroine, locally aka Skiath. The river is supposed to be full of fairy magic that gave this fearsome lady her strength and long life, and we took up the challenge of putting our faces in it for seven seconds. As you can imagine, i was very awake after that.
We drove to Dunvegan Castle, the ancestral seat of the MacLeod clan, and inhabited by that family in an unbroken line since the twelfth century. The castle is closed to visitors for the winter, but contains a silk tapestry/scarf/flag called the Fairy Banner. The banner was given to the clan by the fairyfolk father of the wife of one MacLeid chieftain, and is said to be able to call the fairy powers to the aid of the clan in a time of dire need.
We had sweet potato, chilli and coconut soup, plus coffee at Skye’s main town of Portree, then drove off again through more ridiculously beautiful peninsulas and mountains. All the towns here have very bizzare Scandinavian names like trottenish and uig.
We walked up Storr rock, meaning ‘big’ in old Scandinavian, where every film ever has been shot, including highlander, stardust, and the new Aliens movie (with Charlize Theron and the Swedish actress who played the Girl wtdt). It was a steep slippery walk and in a few places huge rocks had fallen onto the path, causing us to divert and look fearfully overhead at the spires you can see in the picture. The clouds enclosed the east side of the mountain in opaque mist, and hooded crows soared beside us making strange ‘p-lop’ calls that sound like drips echoing off stone. To the west, the sky opened out further and showed shreds of blue. From atop the Storr we could see vast distances either side; the shoreline curved each way into folds and fjords of high green or golden hills and sheer black cliffs.
Our next stop was one of these, named Kilt, after the giants’ causeway-like formation of rock that gives the cliffs a tartan pattern. Neil had a kilt for the occasion, for dress-ups. One of the other Aussie girls on the tour said laughingly to me: ‘omg, have you seen the medieval club that meet every week at Melbourne uni?!’ I said: ‘what do you mean the medieval club; the SCA, the Varangian guard, or MARS? Or maybe the fantasy society?’ and without giving her a chance to draw astonished breath, I rocked that kilt. It’s an old fashioned brave heart kilt which is literally also a big blanket.
After the kilt cliff we drove to a sheltered valley in the middle of a wide mountain-ringed plain. Within this valley is the weirdest patch of land I’ve ever been in. It’s believed that fairies have always lived here in Skye, and the remaining fairy population live in a castle in this valley. The valley is much greener than the surrounding plain and contains about 100 strange small hills, like a miniature himalayas or something, and little groves of tiny trees that are in appearance full grown but shorter than me. There is hill taller than an the rest, with a broad rocky head on top of it, which could be a castle in keeping with the miniature scale. Remember; fairies in Celtic mythology are much more like Tolkien’s elves than tinkerbelle. And they can be dangerous. One part of the myth tells of a man who bought the land ad built his house on it, moving in with his wife and children. He dug up peat from the glen to burn on his fire, but was warned fiercely against this by other locals, who said ‘you might have bought this land, but you don’t own it.’ But this man didn’t believe that the fairies had any real poer to drive him away, and persisted in burning the peat from the glen. Gradually his cattle sickened and died. The vet could find no cause nor cure. Then his children; the physician couldn’t help. Then his wife. Depending on the version of story, the man threw himself off a cliff or perhaps only moved away, but I’ll tell you what I saw:
There are the definite remains of a house in Fairy Glen, walls two or three foot high. Through these walls; ie through the actual middle of the thickness if the stones, are about seven big trees, much much bigger than the quaint stunted trees all around everywhere else. These trees look exactly like they have been intentionally planted underneath the stone walls to bring the farmer’s house down; there are no trees growing in that area that are not coming from inside a stone wall. Supposedly in addition to the sickness of the farmer’s livestock and family, the fairies caused these great trees to take root inside his walls and destroy his house from inside out.
I have video filmed with my iPad of us driving into the Fairy Glen: I can’t post it here but I can email it. You get to hear our great guide talking too!
We all walked around by ourselves like we were on mushrooms and came back quiet and starry-eyed to the bus. Then Neil surprised us with a present for the ninety minute drive back to our village; whiskey! It lasted shamefully briefly between eleven of us, swigging and passing up and down the bus. We came back home in excellent cheer and I cooked for 12 of us with £12.70 worth of groceries. The gang have all gone back to Saucy Mary’s.
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