Colbost

From village shop to destination dining

The whitewashed cottage on the shore of Loch Dunvegan was Colbost's village shop before it began serving lunch. Peter MacAskill inherited it in the 1960s, and his wife Joy turned it into a tearoom that sold what came off the boats at the door. "It was mostly all fish and seafood, very little else — lobster salad, salmon salad, cod and mackerel," she recalled. The place is now The Three Chimneys, a restaurant the Good Food Guide calls one of the most far-flung in Britain.

The food is still shaped by what Skye's fishermen, crofters and foragers bring in. The scallop divers David and Ben Oakes land their Pecten maximus alive on the day of harvest. Lobster, langoustines, crab, mussels and oysters move through the seasonal menus, and the crab tagliatelle and a deconstructed cheesecake are among the dishes Judy Murray has singled out. Six bedroom suites, added in 1999 in a building called the House Over-By, mean you can stay here after dining, subject to booking, which on these roads is worth something. Shirley and Eddie Spear ran it from 1985; the current head chef, Paul Green, started as a commis under Michael Smith and came back to run the kitchen in 2025.

Craft and crofting memory

Colbost is otherwise a scattered crofting hamlet strung along the B884, looking east across the loch from the Duirinish peninsula. Another local business is Skye Silver, a jewellery workshop in The Old School that has made silver and gold gifts here for more than fifty years, some finished with kiln-fired vitreous enamel.

The croft museum is the reason many people know the name. Peter MacAskill built it in 1969 around the blackhouse next to the cottage where he grew up: one room for the family, one for the livestock, and a central fire whose smoke left through the thatch and blackened it. Storm damage to the roof has closed it until further notice. A rear replica of an illicit still house collapsed some years ago and was removed; the surviving thatched house, a Skye dwelling of the later nineteenth century, still stands.

Broch and headland

Above the loch sits Dun Colbost, a ruinous Iron Age broch on a rocky knoll, facing a second broch across the water. Excavations in the late 1980s and 1990s turned up paving, drains and a hearth. Its entrance is blocked and marked dangerous, so it is best appreciated from a distance rather than walked into.

The walking is the real draw. Neist Point, Skye's westernmost headland, is a couple of miles of concrete path and steps out to a lighthouse built in 1909 by David A. Stevenson. The cliffs are unfenced, and the view takes in Waterstein Head and the sea stack An t-Aigeach, the Stallion's Head, with the Outer Hebrides laid out beyond; minke whales sometimes surface offshore in summer. There is no bus to the start — the nearest stop is at Glendale, five kilometres back. North of Dunvegan Castle, the walk to the Coral Beaches at Claigan ends at a pale strand that looks like coral but is calcified algae called maerl, with seals hauled out along the loch.

Dunvegan for a family day

Dunvegan, five miles east, has Dunvegan Castle, gardens and family day out: a key hunt for children, a wooded trail with a playground, and short seal trips from the jetty when the weather allows. Dogs on leads are welcome in the gardens. Getting here means the single-track B884, or a fifty-one mile drive from Kyle of Lochalsh, the nearest railway station.

The loch at the door

Joy MacAskill's tearoom sold fish delivered to the door. Something of that has held: the scallops still arrive alive, and the loch the old shop once faced is still there.