31/03/2026
The Isle of Skye has a reputation for rain.
What nobody tells you is that the rain is the point — that there’s something about wet shoes and grey skies and a hot bowl of smoked fish soup that strips everything back to what actually matters. We went looking for wild landscapes. We found those. But we also found something slower and harder to name, the particular feeling of being somewhere that doesn’t care whether you’re having a good time, and somehow that making it perfect.
This is how it went.
We landed in Edinburgh at the end of April, late enough that the city was already going to sleep. Hotel, snacks, bed — the unglamorous start to most good trips.
Morning was better. Greggs. If you’ve never had a Greggs sausage roll fresh from the bag on a Scottish morning with a coffee in the other hand, I’m not sure what to tell you except that you should fix that. Zala had one. I had two. I’m still thinking about them.
We had hours to kill before our campervan pickup, so we sat in a café the way you do when you’re somewhere between two things — phones out, coffee cooling, not quite present anywhere. That’s when Zala looked up from her screen and said: what if we go to Kyrgyzstan this summer?
Twenty minutes later we had flights booked. That’s the kind of decision a Greggs sausage roll puts you in the mood for apparently.
(The Kyrgyzstan story has its own post. You should read it. We almost got struck by lightning.)
At 2:30 p.m., we picked up our van from Indie Campers.
Now, here’s the honest truth: the van was fine, but the experience? Mixed. The “kitchen pack” we paid extra for included a couple of mugs, one pot, and a plastic plate. No cutlery, no knives — we ended up buying our own.
The two stacked beds couldn’t “be removed” (until we later realized you literally just lift one off). Pillows were barely more than folded napkins. And the water heater only worked when the cabin heat was on — which we learned after three days of cold showers.
Still, the van ran smoothly, didn’t complain, and got us where we needed to go. We left with a 5-star smile they gently “encouraged” us to give, grabbed supplies from Tesco (beer, snacks, and too much bread), and pointed the van north toward the Highlands.
There’s a moment driving through the Highlands where the landscape stops being background and becomes the whole thing. For us it happened somewhere around Glencoe, the light dropping, the mountains going dark at the edges, the road narrowing between them.
We pulled over just short of the Skye Bridge. Tesco curry warmed on the van’s small stove. A beer each, watched through the windscreen as the loch turned silver and then black. It wasn’t a fancy evening. It was better than that.
Skye in late April, twenty degrees, blue skies. We knew immediately that we were getting away with something.
The Quiraing loop starts gently and then reveals itself slowly — ridges, drops, rock formations that look like they were designed by someone with a flair for the dramatic and unlimited time. The grass is that specific saturated green that only exists in places where it rains constantly, which Skye does, just not on this particular morning.
We walked together mostly in silence, which is the best kind of company on a trail.
Then the wind found us on the ridge.
It had been building for a while — that particular Skye wind that doesn’t gust so much as commit — and then in one moment it reached up and lifted my hat clean off my head. My Jura hat. The one Zala brought back from her trip to Islay and Jura, the one that had been on my head through enough adventures to have earned its place there.
I watched it go for about half a second before the trail runner in me took over. I bombed the downhill — proper downhill running form, the kind that makes hikers nervous — scanning every patch of grass and heather. The wind had already made its decision. The hat was gone.
I walked back up the ridge, hatless.
We finished the loop, ate square sausage rolls in the van — which became the unofficial meal of the trip, cheap and perfect and somehow always exactly right — and drove down to Uig to visit the Isle of Skye Brewery. Local beers, a proper tasting, the satisfaction of buying something made exactly where you’re standing.
And Zala, quietly, found me a new hat. Almost identical to the one I’d lost that morning. She handed it over without making a big thing of it, the way she does things, and I put it on and it fit exactly right. Balance restored.
Later that day, we wandered around the Fairy Glen — soft hills, stone circles, sheep, and a strange stillness. It’s a bit touristy, sure, but sitting there on the grass with a beer in hand, it felt like time slowed down.
That evening we parked by the sea — no campsite, no neighbours, just the van and the wind and the water going dark. We ate outside, drank the brewery beers, watched the sun find the horizon.
Nobody else in sight. The world very quiet. That’s the whole thing, right there.
Neist Point is Skye at its most dramatic — a narrow headland pushing out into the Atlantic, cliffs dropping away on both sides, a lighthouse at the tip that looks like it was placed there specifically to make you feel small. Sheep everywhere, entirely unbothered by the wind that was doing its best to push us sideways.
We walked to the lighthouse and back, said nothing particularly meaningful, felt it anyway.
After that, it was time for lunch — and oh boy, what a lunch.
I want to talk about The Oyster Shed properly, because it deserves it.
It’s a shed. Literally. In Carbost, on the loch, small enough that you might miss it if you weren’t looking. Inside, they open oysters right in front of you — fresh, cold, with nothing more than a squeeze of lemon if you want it. We had smoked fish soup that tasted like the sea had been condensed into a bowl. Lobster. Crab patties. And then the oysters.
We finished the plate, looked at each other, and ordered another without speaking. That’s the measure of a meal.
Talisker Distillery was right nearby — we walked past, noted it for later, kept moving. More hiking ahead. The whisky was coming, just not yet.
The Fairy Pools are where Skye gets mythological.
A series of cascading pools and small waterfalls cutting down a valley from the Cuillin mountains, the water impossibly clear and blue-green in the right light. Most people walk the lower section and turn back. We kept going, up and around the valley, which is how we found ourselves climbing in the rain while the sun was still out somewhere behind us.
The rainbow appeared over the pools below — a full arc, one of those ones that looks slightly unreal, like the landscape is performing. Zala stopped walking and we just stood there for a moment, wet, slightly out of breath, watching it.
There was a plan to climb higher into the Cuillins the next day. The weather made that plan obsolete overnight — cloud, wind, the kind of conditions that punish ambition. We let it go, found a quiet spot to sleep near Portree, and reorganised around what was actually possible.
Knowing when to change the plan is its own skill.
Portree in the morning: a small café, coffee, Zala working for an hour on her laptop while I studied maps. The weather was moody but not impossible. We decided on the Old Man of Storr.
The tourist path takes you to the famous rock formation and back — a fine walk, worth doing. We did that, then continued above it to the actual summit of The Storr. The wind up there was serious. The trail narrowed, the visibility dropped, and it became one of those hikes where you’re making small decisions constantly and trusting that they add up correctly.
The views were worth it. They always are, when you earn them.
Coming down the other side, the path simply disappeared. Not dramatically — it just faded into bog and grass and slope. We picked our way down alongside a waterfall, half-scrambling, shoes taking on water for the third time that week, laughing at something that could have been annoying if we’d let it be.
Back at the van, wet socks, good mood.
That night: Sligachan campsite, a warm shower that felt like it resolved something, and Seumas’ Bar — hearty food, dark wood, locals who’d clearly been coming here for years, and drams of Skye and Raasay whisky that tasted like the week had earned them.
Some evenings everything just lands right. That was one.
Square sausage bun for the last time. There’s a particular small sadness to the final version of a trip’s recurring meal.
Elgol beach was beautiful and calm — the kind of place that probably rewards you more if you go out on the water, but we were happy enough just standing at the edge of it, looking out at the Cuillins from the south. Torabhaig Distillery for coffee and cake and a look around — whisky for another time, or maybe another life. Broadford for souvenirs, the kind of unhurried shopping you only do when you know you’re leaving.
And then Cullen Skink. One last bowl at a small place in Broadford — smoked haddock, cream, potato, the kind of soup that feels like it was made specifically for cold wet places and people who’ve been walking in them. I finished it and immediately wished there was more.
Then the long drive south.
Loch Ness slid past the windows, appropriately grey and vast and keeping its secrets. Edinburgh opened up ahead of us — the castle on its rock, Princes Street, the particular energy of a city after a week of emptiness.
We found a pub. Ordered pints. Sat across from each other in the way you do at the end of something good, not quite ready to call it finished.
I’ve been trying to figure out what to say here, and I think the honest answer is: Skye doesn’t give you a holiday. It gives you something slightly harder and much better.
The wet shoes. The hat lost to the wind. The cold showers we didn’t need to have but had anyway. The plans abandoned to weather. The waterfall descent that wasn’t on any map. These weren’t the obstacles to the trip — they were the trip.
There’s a version of travel that’s about comfort and curation and seeing the things you’re supposed to see. And then there’s the other kind. The kind where you park by the sea alone and eat dinner in the wind and it’s perfect for no reason you can fully explain.
Skye is the second kind. It doesn’t perform for you. It just exists — old, indifferent, spectacular — and you either meet it on its terms or you miss the point entirely.
We’re already talking about going back.
Written somewhere between a coffee and a whisky, on a week that felt longer than it was — in the best possible way.
@mihagrasic Hikes, Sunsets, Trails, Beers, Whisky, Oysters... The Isle of Skye gave us everything we came for... and something we didn't know we needed. w/ lovely @Zala Rauter 🥰 #isleofskye #scotland #hiking #trails #travel ♬ original sound - Miha | Granola Trails
@mihagrasic Hey, take a moment. Step into silence. Join us for a peaceful hike through the Quiraing. w @Zala Rauter #scotland #hiking #isleofskye #quiraing #peaceful #calm Music from #Uppbeat ♬ original sound - Miha | Granola Trails
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