"When is an Island not an Island? " a Isle of Skye Travel Page by kit_mc

London - SKYE - Lewis - Harris - SKYE - Loch Lomond - Glasgow - London

After a long, long, oh very, very looooong 10 hour drive directly from London (now at what point did that seem like a good idea?), not necessarily what most people want to be doing on a Friday evening, we finally arrived in Skye the first stop on a whistlestop tour of the Inner and Outer Hebrides.

The meandering route taken to Skye through the Highland mountains on the mainland, past beautiful and slightly foreboding lochs already had me pretty much blown away. Having never been any further north in the UK than Glasgow, this was the Scotland that I'd seen in adverts and films. The real Mackoy, if you'll forgive the pun...

Rather than catching the ferry from Mallaig on the mainland to Armadale on Skye, we'd taken the route through Kintail and over onto the Skye Bridge, built about 10 years ago, a few thousand tonnes of concrete that have made the island that little less isolated - has it weakened Skye's island character perhaps though? Discuss...

For three days in total spent on Skye, Kyleakin (pron. Kyle-ah-kin, although I developed a total mental block with this and constantly pronounced it anything but accurately) near the bridge was used as base. I'm not sure that I'd recommend this, perhaps better to use the biggest town, Portree, as everything is within easier reach of there and to be honest I didn't warm to Kyleakin as it's a mishmash of buildings with very little character. Skye may well be your stepping stone further out as a ferry goes from Uig (I can't say that name often enough - ooooh-iiiig) in the north of the island to Tarbert on the Isle of Harris, about twice a day, 6 days a week. Most definitely not Sunday though. Yet.

There may now be a bridge to the mainland, but you certainly get the sense that you're entering an area of Scotland that has a very different sense of itself. Driving through Kyle of Lochalsh, you get a view of Skye, with it's mountains across the water, towering over and reflected on, Loch Alsh. The fact that we arrived at twilight seemed to accentuate the mysteriousness of it all to a city boy like myself, having always had a bit of a thing for such isolated places.

First impressions aside, Skye doesn't quite have the isolation factor, or quite the desolate, hauntingly beautiful sense that I later felt on Harris and Lewis. For starters, village communities feel as if they're less distance from each other, there's more traffic - though still not much - and things feel that little more touristy than in the Outer Hebrides. Coach tours are very much in evidence here so beware you don't arrive at that Museum of Island Life just as the SAGA coach pulls in...

In a sense I'd say that Skye is maybe slightly overshadowed in some ways by the Outer Hebrides, although I'd be surprised if it isn't Skye that gets the most visitors, simply because it's closer to the rest of civilisation. The long arm of the Free Church of Scotland also seems a little less strong here, with more places open on Sundays, so no bad thing in my book. Skye's landscape, to me at least, was more reminiscent of that which we'd driven through on the mainland and that meant that the romantic mysteriousness factor waned a little.

Part of the trip to the Hebrides though was to enable my friend to investigate parts of his family tree, in particular to see the parts of Skye where his late mother had spent the early years of her life - to see the views that she would have woken up to as a child - and to understand why she in fact never returned to this isolated place. This personalised being on Skye for me more than the other islands I guess. While most of the visitors to Kilmuir Graveyard were looking for Flora Macdonald's grave, we were searching for his family burial plot. We even managed to find the remains of a tiny, largely forgotten community, three dry stone buildings, walls partially intact, abandoned perhaps 100 years ago by his great grandparents.

Assuming that you're not researching your family tree - although going by the relatively large number of adverts I saw in the Hebridean press for local companies to help you do just that, I'm assuming it's big business - there's still plenty to do on Skye that'll keep you there a few days. While there I visited Eilean Dunan Castle about 30 minutes away on the mainland, took a tour of the Talisker whiskey distillery - well, know what you're drinking I say - got drenched in rain several times, saw ruined homesteads, castles and churches and walked around numerous graveyards containing dozens of gravestones, marked with perhaps only half a dozen surnames.

No way in God's Green Earth could I live on Skye, and landscape-wise, I found the desolate beauty of Lewis and Harris more dramatic in that desolate, 'jeez, this'd be a good place to disappear off the edge of the world', kind of way. BUT I'd still recommend using Skye as the stepping off point to the outer islands, staying on a day or so, just hanging out, either acclimatising to the quiet on the way out to the outer islands or girding yourself for the return to the big wide world on the way back.