Braes

Woodland and the Braes peninsula

White markers lead into a wood of birch, hazel, rowan and juniper. Coille Iòsal, about two kilometres and three quarters of an hour, climbs to a cascade and returns over open ground, with Raasay and Ben Tianavaig filling the view. It is a short, easy walk and more or less the shape of Braes: a scatter of townships along a single-track road, looking out at water and hills.

That road is the B883, which runs down a peninsula from the Portree side, past Balmeanach and Gedintailor, and gives out near Peinchorran. Braes faces north to Trotternish, east across the Sound of Raasay, and south to the Cuillin, with the cone of Glamaig closing the view. The rock is tilted basalt, so the ground steps as it rises.

Coast, hill and nearby tables

At An Aird, a walk of three kilometres from Gedintailor, a raised gravel bar joins the headland to the shore — a tombolo, sitting on a beach the sea left between roughly eight thousand and six and a half thousand years ago. A good path reaches the sand; beyond it the headland is pathless and can be boggy. For something longer, Ben Tianavaig rises to 413 metres above Camustianavaig, and the old drove road from Peinachorrain runs beside Loch Sligachan all the way to Sligachan, a route the unsigned Skye Trail borrows.

For food and drink, head to Portree or Sligachan. The West Highland Bar at the Portree Hotel pours Isle of Skye Brewery pints, and the hotel's Antlers Bar & Grill serves Highland dishes. Further out, at the foot of the Cuillin, Seumas' Bar offers real ales, hearty food and a collection of more than 400 whiskies.

The Battle of the Braes

In April 1882, crofters had been denied grazing on Ben Lee, grazed their stock there anyway, and withheld rent. When a sheriff officer came to serve eviction papers, Donald Nicolson seized them and set them alight with a burning peat. Police reinforcements arrived from Glasgow, arrested five men, and were pursued back down the road with stones, sticks and agricultural flails. "Huge boulders darkened the horizon as they sped from the hands of the infuriated men and women," wrote David Gow of the Dundee Advertiser. By the end of the year Lord Macdonald restored grazing rights, though tenants now had to pay for land formerly included in their rent. A bilingual cairn near Ollach, put up in 1980, marks the ground.

From protest to reform

The trouble carried further than the peninsula. In May 1883 the Napier Commission began hearing crofters' evidence at the old church at Upper Ollach, one strand of a wider process of reform; the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act followed in 1886, bringing security of tenure.

Buses and the village hall

Braes Village Hall's car park is the starting point for the woodland walk. Highland Council publishes bus information for journeys in the area.