Hallin

The Broch and Crofting Township

The broch stands on a flat-topped outcrop above Hallin, and from the top you can see sea lochs on both sides of the peninsula at once. Dùn Hallin is Iron Age, its drystone wall still about 3.4 metres high in places, with a recognisable entrance passage, two possible guard cells and the lower steps of a stair set into the wall. It is Scheduled Monument SM916. The huts and enclosures scattered around it were worked as shieling ground into the early twentieth century.

Hallin is not a village with a shop. It is a dispersed crofting township, its houses spread across Waternish from the road towards Trumpan down to the west coast, the old pattern still legible in drystone walls, improved fields and fragments of cultivation ridges. The farm first appears in a MacLeod estate rental of 1683; by 1788 fifty-one people lived here, before it was reorganised.

Eating Around Loch Bay

For food and drink you go to nearby Stein, around Loch Bay, where the Stein Inn, Loch Bay restaurant and Skyeskyns sit close together. The Stein Inn dates its hospitality story to 1790, a family-run inn with a bar, a restaurant and a snug, log burners and candles. The kitchen leans on what comes out of Loch Bay: fish chowder, peat-smoked Skye fish, beer-battered haddock, wild venison haunch, whole lobster, brown crab, langoustines and mussels. The bar keeps more than a hundred and twenty Scottish whiskies, and the garden tables look out across the water to the Outer Hebrides. Dogs and children are welcome. Nigella Lawson called it "incredibly fresh and beautiful local ingredients, cooked simply and perfectly."

A few doors along is Loch Bay, a six-table seafood restaurant with a Michelin star in a building of about the same age. Michael and Laurence Smith run it, and the langoustines and lobster for the Skye Fruits de Mer are passed through the kitchen window straight from the jetty. It is a small room, and booking is advisable.

Tannery, Farm and the Point

Also in Stein is Skyeskyns, Scotland's only remaining commercial sheepskin tannery, which gives free tours of the tannery and runs a seasonal café doing coffee, bakes and soup. Waternish Farm, near Stein, serves coffee and cake alongside a conservation talk and, in summer, a guided walk, though you need to book first.

The long walk out to Waternish Point starts at Trumpan Church, eight and a half miles there and back, boggy in the middle and pathless at the end, finishing at the lighthouse on the cliffs. It is good ground for watching the sea; you may spot whales, dolphins, porpoises, basking sharks and seals off the point.

Telford's Hallin Church

Thomas Telford designed the parish church at Hallin, built in 1828 as one of the Parliamentary churches, a plain harled T-plan building inside a drystone dyke, with his manse and steading beside it. There is no railway on Skye; you drive in on the B886 through Stein, then a minor road north towards Hallin and Trumpan.

Hallin's Community Hall

The community hall sits near the war memorial, on a central site the local committee chose over Stein back in 1948. It opened on 7 June 1951, when Dame Flora MacLeod of MacLeod was piped in by Allan M. Beaton, home on leave from the RAF. In early 2026 it was running a Thursday café and soup-and-pudding afternoons.