Ashaig

Coffee, Crofts and the Tidal Shore

The coffee at Ashaig comes out of a converted shipping container on a working croft. Lean To Coffee is run by Seren Stephens and Lorenz Geng, and its outdoor seating sits inside the ruins of an old crofter's cottage, part of it now under cover. The beans are birch coffee, roasted up the road in Portree; alongside them are honey-soaked sticky chai, ceremonial-grade matcha, sourdough toasties with fillings that change, granola breakfast bowls, cinnamon buns and traybakes. The flour is organic, the sugar and chocolate Fairtrade, and there are vegan and gluten-reduced options for anyone who needs them.

Ashaig itself is a small crofting township beside Upper and Lower Breakish, strung between the A87 and the tidal shore of Ob Breakish. The beach is sand and shallow water where the inlet meets the sea, and it is undeveloped. Broadford Bay opens out beyond it, with Beinn na Caillich behind. Birdwatchers rate the bay among the best on Skye, and Ashaig and Ardnish feed the same stretch of coast.

The Airfield and Cill Ashik

The most conspicuous modern thing here is the airfield. The Royal Engineers built it in 1972, and Loganair flew a scheduled Glasgow service from it until 1988. Its asphalt runway runs 771 metres, and an emergency-services zone is kept clear, but no scheduled flight has left in decades. Today it is used by the Skye Flying Club, the occasional visiting aircraft and the air ambulance. Vehicle access needs prior permission. It is an operational airfield, not somewhere to wander.

About seventy metres back from the shore is Cill Ashik, where people have been buried for a very long time. The church whose name means "church of the ferry" now survives only as a turf platform, roughly nine metres by seven and up to 0.8 metres high, and the cemetery around it is still in use. With it sit a holy well, a shell midden that turned out to be about nine-tenths periwinkle shell, and a curved boundary that may follow the line of a much older oval graveyard. Finds from the ground include a Neolithic polished stone axe, a small cross-incised slab from perhaps the seventh century, and an ornamented bronze strap-end from the eleventh.

Maelrubha and a Broadford Detour

Fifty metres northeast of the well stands Creag an Leabhar, a natural limestone outcrop known as the pulpit rock. St Maelrubha, an Irish priest born around 642 and once abbot of Bangor, is said by tradition to have preached from it. He crossed to Scotland in 671 and founded the monastery at Applecross, across the water, two years later. The place-name carries him too: Ashaig comes from a word for a ferry, and a seventeenth-century form of it translates as the Ferry of Maelrubha.

For a pub, you go to Broadford, down the A87. The Gabbro Bar at the Broadford Hotel has pool, darts, quiz nights and live music, dogs are welcome, and the hotel's resident dog is called Rosie. Deli Gasta, in the town's old mill since 2016, stocks Great Glen Charcuterie venison, Namara crab and Hebridean Smokehouse smoked salmon. From Broadford the waymarked Marble Line follows a former quarry railway eight miles up towards views of Blaven, past a winding-wheel base and quarry waste from workings that ran until 1912.

Arriving by Rail and Bus

Kyle of Lochalsh, across the Skye Bridge on the mainland, is the railhead and the terminus of ScotRail's Kyle line. Stagecoach's service 55 stops at Ashaig, Camp Site.

The Holy Well and Its Offerings

The holy well retains the base stones of a former enclosure around its spring. Coins recovered from the well are evidence of offerings left by visitors.