Glendale

Crofts, Produce and Open Sky

At the edge of the road near Lephin, a few crofts keep honesty boxes at their gates: seasonal eggs, vegetables, herbs, jams, pickles and chutneys, left out with a tin for the money. Down at Meanish Pier, fishermen sell their catch direct. It tells you quickly what kind of place you have come to.

Glendale is not a single street but a scatter of townships spread across an 18,956-acre crofting estate that runs from the cliffs at Neist Point back to Loch Pooltiel and Loch Dunvegan, with open moor rising toward MacLeod's Tables behind. The Gaelic name, Gleann Dail, is glossed as the valley with level fields by a river. You will find crofts, sea lochs, high cliffs and a good deal of sky, and if you watch the water you may see seals, otters, seabirds, cetaceans, and both sea and golden eagles.

Lephin Food and Colbost Dining

Lephin has the village shop, which doubles as the post office and stocks groceries, frozen food, maps, books, stationery and a small off-licence. On the road to Neist Point, Café Lephin is a family-run licensed café that makes soup and baguettes to order, does light lunches and home baking, and serves Isle of Skye ice cream alongside Skye ales and Thistly Cross cider.

For dinner, the estate has a well-known restaurant. The Three Chimneys occupies a low-beamed former crofter's cottage at Colbost and has been running for more than forty years, building its tasting menus around what Skye's fishermen, crofters, growers and foragers can supply that week; vegetarian and pescatarian versions are offered. Head chef Paul Green started here as a commis under Michael Smith, then spent more than twenty years away with chefs including Simon Rogan, Martin Wishart and Adam Reid before coming back. He describes the aim as "Skye's freshest ingredients presented simply and with a focus on flavour so that the products speak for themselves."

Neist Point on Foot

Walk out to Neist Point. It is a short trip, three kilometres there and back, but the concrete path has steps and runs beside unfenced cliffs, so it is not a stroll to take lightly. At the end sits the lighthouse, a whitewashed three-stage tower first lit in November 1909, engineered by David A. Stevenson and automated in 1990. The lighthouse is not open to the public, but the view across to the Outer Hebrides is the point, and in summer this is one of the better places on Skye to watch for whales. Several scenes of Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves were filmed here. For a longer day, the clifftop circuit toward Milovaig covers eleven kilometres over sheep tracks and boggy ground, past the Oisgill burn and the old pier before returning by road through the crofts.

The Glendale Crofters' Struggle

Glendale earned its place in Scottish history in the 1880s, when the crofter John MacPherson led resistance after common grazing was withheld. He and four others were jailed for two months; an 1883 return lists his holding at £4 4s, three cattle and eight sheep. The land struggle here was part of the wider pressure that led to the 1886 Crofters Holdings Act and security of tenure, and by the mid-1950s the crofters owned their in-bye land individually and their hill grazings collectively. MacPherson died at Milovaig in 1922, aged eighty-seven.

Roads, Rail and Pedal-Powered Weaving

The mainland railhead is Kyle of Lochalsh; from there it is road: the B884 from Dunvegan, which for centuries was only a drovers' track, or the limited Stagecoach 56 bus to Portree. At Fasach, the Skye Weavers make tweed, scarves and throws on a loom driven by bicycle pedals, and if you stop to watch they may well ask if you would like a go.