The rock that comes down onto the Flodigarry shore is fossil-bearing, grey and shale-like. Ammonites and belemnites work loose from a landslip that is still moving, at the foot of a coast where soft Jurassic layers are being pressed down by heavier lava above. A path of about a mile crosses grazing land from a red phone box, where parking runs out quickly, to a rocky beach. The boulders are slippery. The views run across Eilean Flodigarry to the Torridon mountains on the mainland. Anything unusual you turn up is meant to go to the Staffin Dinosaur Museum.
This is a scattered crofting township on the north-east corner of Trotternish, below the Quiraing and facing the Minch. Local memory holds that potatoes were once planted where the sea now reaches.
The one place to eat and drink in Flodigarry itself is the Flodigarry Hotel, a country house designed by Ross & Macbeth in 1892 and turned into a hotel in 1928. It has a lounge, a whisky bar and a terrace looking out to sea. The kitchen leans on named local suppliers: hand-dived Skye scallops from Ben Oakes, 35-day matured Highland beef, Skye venison, Kilmuir lamb. A dinner might run to a Hebridean pork and Stornoway black-pudding Scotch pie, lamb kidney with lamb-fat skirlie, rumble-de-thumps and turnip, or whole baked sole for two. Lunch has included a haggis Scotch egg with whisky mustard and a smoked-haddock and Isle of Mull toastie.
For walkers, the ground rises quickly toward the Quiraing. Fingal's Pinnacles is a three-mile circuit from Loch Langaig, climbing 278 metres past the line of an old route to early-twentieth-century diatomite workings and up towards the cliffs of Leac nan Fionn. The full Quiraing circuit starts higher still, at the top of the Staffin–Uig road rather than in the village, and passes the formations known as the Prison, the Needle and the Table. The return crosses pathless moor, and in bad weather the tops are exposed.
For coffee and lunch you go four miles south to Staffin, along the A855. The Hungry Gull does brunch and in-house baking out of the community hall. Columba 1400 runs a café and gift shop whose takings support its work with young people, with soup, toasties, home baking, a terrace and Wi-Fi. Down at the community-owned harbour, Andi Dunkel and Paul Milne roast small batches at Corran Coffee from beans grown as far off as Uganda, Rwanda and Colombia; the harbour also has public toilets, showers, bike hire and a sea sauna. On the same shore, at An Corran, dinosaur footprints surface around mid-tide or after winter storms. Cathy and Paul Booth found the first in 2001, and Dr Neil Clark and Dugald Ross went on to find seventeen more.
Buses 57A and 57C run from the Flodigarry Road End to Portree through Kilmuir and Uig; Portree itself is about twenty miles south, and the nearest railhead is well off the island at Kyle of Lochalsh.
Behind the hotel stands a cottage traditionally associated with Flora MacDonald, though the building's own age and identity are disputed. She married Allan MacDonald at Flodigarry on 6 November 1750; the wedding festivities lasted most of a week, and she is said to have lived here until the family moved to Kingsburgh in 1772. Samuel Johnson, who met her later on his Hebridean tour, called her "a woman of soft features, gentle manners, kind soul and elegant presence." In the hotel grounds sits Dun Flodigarry, a drystone broch of around two thousand years ago, its walls up to four metres thick; the people who dug it in the early 1980s thought it had been abandoned before it was ever finished.
Flora is buried a few miles further round the coast at Kilmuir, in a cemetery near the eight thatched cottages of the Skye Museum of Island Life. One of them, the Old Croft House, was still lived in until 1957.