Aird of Sleat

From mission church to Sound views

At the end of Aird of Sleat's single-track road there is a church, closed and sold for conversion in the 1980s. Donald Fletcher of Tobermory built it in 1908 for £499, using stone cut from the bank of the nearby burn and sand dug from below croft 16; the lime and slates came in by smack and were carried up from the shore by pony. Angus Macfadyen was the first missionary and Donald Macgillivray of No. 18 Aird the first beadle. It became a private home, and the building today houses the Aird Old Church Gallery, where you can find Peter McDermott's watercolours and Skye prints alongside Heather McDermott's jewellery, with cards and mugs if a print is beyond the holiday budget.

Aird is Skye's southernmost settlement, a crofting township scattered over a hillside above the Sound of Sleat. From the road-end viewpoints you look across to Mallaig and the pale sands of Morar, with the mountains of Knoydart lined up behind them.

The walk to the Point

Most people come here to walk to the Point of Sleat. It is 8.5km there and back, three to four hours, and it earns its 400 metres of ascent over rough track and boggy moorland with one steep hill. The reward is an automatic lighthouse — first lit in 1938, the present light dating from 2003 — and a sweep of view that takes in Rum, Eigg, Ardnamurchan and the Cuillin. A short detour drops to the sandy beach at Camas Daraich, which is the part children will remember. Dolphins, gannets and shags are all possible. There is no bus to the start; you arrive by the single-track road, four miles beyond Armadale.

Food across wider Sleat

For that reason the nearest food is not in the village. The Inn at Àird a' Bhàsair in Ardvasar, about four miles back, serves modern Scottish food in its MacNaMara restaurant and keeps a cosy Highland pub, the Bothan Bar, where dogs are welcome; the kitchen leans on seafood, shellfish and Eilean Iarmain estate venison. Farther north, Bar Am Pràban at Hotel Eilean Iarmain does Cullen skink, Gaelic-gin-cured salmon, battered haddock and an estate-venison burger, with langoustines that come in at the old stone pier when they are available, and live Gaelic music by the fire. At Duisdale, An Crùbh is a community-built café and general store that also holds the post office.

A township, school and harbour

The township was busier once. The 1881 map records 91 roofed buildings; the school opened in 1876, reached 84 pupils by 1895, and closed in 1957 with three children left on the register. In 1902 the Congested Districts Board put £20 towards enlarging the harbour at the Point, to double its shelter from thirty boats to sixty, and £27 towards a proper path from Aird. Local people supplied the money and the labour, with fishermen giving their share of the work for free.

The shieling women remembered

Charlie MacGillivray, who lives here, remembers the women who walked three and a half miles to the shielings, slept there, milked the cattle and walked back to feed their families: "I saw the last woman from the village who did that when she was a young girl."