Culnacnoc

Footprints at low tide

At low tide, on the shore below Culnacnoc, the rock pools hold dinosaur footprints. They sit in a lagoon bed laid down about 170 million years ago: small sauropod hand and foot prints, and three-toed theropod tracks, roughly fifty of them described by a University of Edinburgh team in 2018. Later work at the same headland turned up probable stegosaur tracks, among the oldest known anywhere. The Skye Nature Conservation Order protects them, so the rule on the shore is simple. Look, do not touch.

You reach them by a signed path from the A855, the road that carries the whole Trotternish loop past the township. The walk to Rubha nam Bràithrean, Brothers' Point, is about two and a quarter miles out and back, an hour or two with a steady 238-metre climb. The path down to the shore is good. The final push onto the headland is not: it is steep and runs above vertical drops. From the tip the view opens along the coast and across to Raasay, Rona and the mainland.

The fort and the crofts

The headland has been worked before. Its high point holds the Iron Age dun, Dun Hasan, and around the shore a quarry runs for at least 250 metres, the rock pocked with circular hollows where millstones were cut, rotary querns 350 to 400 millimetres across. Historic Environment Scotland says the pairing of fort and quarry may represent a defended prehistoric industrial site controlling millstone production.

Culnacnoc itself is a line of crofts between the Trotternish Ridge and the Sound of Raasay, the ridge and its still-moving landslip standing over the houses, waterfalls dropping off the basalt cliffs behind. It is twelve miles north of Portree and roughly halfway between the Old Man of Storr and the Quiraing, about six miles to each. The Glenview Inn, once an award-winning restaurant, became Skye's first dedicated pie café in 2015, the Highland Game pie running venison, pheasant and red wine, before that closed too and the building carried on as a B&B.

Food and fossils in Staffin

For food and supplies you go up the road to Staffin, where the community hall holds most of what you need under one roof: Staffin Stores for groceries, fresh fruit and veg and local produce, plus public toilets, a laundry, and a gym upstairs with treadmills, bikes and weights. The Hungry Gull does brunch, potato cakes with vegan sausage and sriracha, a muffin stacked with Lorne sausage, potato scone and fried egg, katsu chicken curry, black-pudding toasties. Columba 1400, a social-enterprise café whose takings go back into its work with young people, keeps homemade soup, toasties and baking, with a terrace and Wi-Fi. The dinosaur museum in Staffin, started by a teenage Dugald Ross in 1976, explains what you have been looking at on the shore.

Flodigarry and Mealt Falls

North at Flodigarry, a Victorian house below the Quiraing runs a hotel with a whisky bar and a sea-view terrace; the kitchen leans on hand-dived Skye scallops, Kilmuir lamb and Skye venison, with a Talisker-and-chocolate cremeux to finish. A little further on, the roadside viewpoint at Kilt Rock looks onto a ninety-metre wall of basalt columns, Mealt Falls dropping more than sixty metres to the sea below it. Buses on the Trotternish loop, the 57A and 57C, stop at Glenview, though they are few and worth checking against your day.

The seven names remembered

The war memorial above the old school site was raised in 1921 for seven boys from Valtos School killed in the First World War. At the remembrance service each year their names are still read with their sloinneadh, the Gaelic patronymics that place a man by his father and grandfather rather than his surname.