From the car park at Braes Village Hall, white markers lead into a wood of birch, hazel, rowan and juniper. The path — Coille Iòsal, about two kilometres and three quarters of an hour — climbs to a cascade and returns over open ground, with Raasay and the hill of Ben Tianavaig filling the view. It is a short walk and an easy one, 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.
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.
Braes has no shop or pub of its own; Portree, across the bay, supplies them. The West Highland Bar there pours Isle of Skye Brewery pints, and the adjoining Antlers Bar & Grill does blade of beef, fish and chips, and sticky toffee pudding. Above Quay Brae, Café Arriba changes its menu daily and runs to all-day breakfasts, poached egg royale and summer-fruit pancakes. Further out, at the foot of the Cuillin, Seumas' Bar at Sligachan keeps more than four hundred whiskies and serves Cullen skink, haggis bon-bons and venison stew. The bar is named after a dog, Seumas, that a former owner was fond of.
In April 1882, crofters had been denied grazing on Ben Lee, grazed their stock there anyway, and withheld rent; when sheriff officers came to serve papers, the women made them burn the documents. 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 had handed the grazing back, though the tenants had to pay £74 15s for what their rent had once included. A bilingual cairn near Ollach, put up in 1980, marks the ground.
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 run along the A87 at the Braes road end rather than into the townships. The village hall, meanwhile, keeps its own calendar — yoga most weeks, and now and then a ceilidh.