At 11 Kendram, a small takeaway called Bûrr has served coffee, homemade cakes and a shelf of gifts. A recent Skye food guide singles out its cardamom-and-rose hot chocolate; visitors mention the carrot cake and jars of rhubarb-and-ginger jam. It is less a café than a window you stop at, which fits Kilmaluag well enough.
The place is not a village in the usual sense. It is a scattered crofting township at the northern tip of the Trotternish peninsula, spread across Solitote, Aird, Connista, Kendram and Balmacqueen, with no real centre. From Port Gobhlaig and Kilmaluag Bay you look east across the water to the Wester Ross mainland; from the higher ground the view swings north and west over the Little Minch towards Harris.
Getting here means the A855, the single loop road around north Trotternish between Staffin and Uig, and then minor single-track lanes down to the bay and the trailheads. Buses on the Portree–Flodigarry–Uig route call at Kilmaluag Balmacqueen, though not often. The nearest railway is at Kyle of Lochalsh, back on the mainland.
The Rubha Hunish circuit starts from a minor road by the Kilmaluag phone box, signed Shulista, and runs 8.5 kilometres out to the northernmost point of Skye and back, with 340 metres of climbing across three to five hours. The outward path is good going; later stretches turn boggy, and the optional drop to the headland is a steep, rocky scramble. Walkhighlands calls it "the best walk on Skye for seabird and marine mammal watching." Bring what you need; there are no facilities once you leave the road.
The route passes the abandoned houses of Erisco and the ruin of Duntulm Castle before reaching the cliffs, where you may spot shags, razorbills, summer gannets, otters around Tulm Bay, and, in July and August, dolphins, porpoises and whales offshore. Below the cliffs are basalt columns, sea stacks, a natural arch and the parallel ridges of old lazybeds.
The bay has a quieter distinction. Its rock is the partial type section of the Kilmaluag Formation, some twenty metres of mudstone, limestone and sandstone laid down in shallow Jurassic lagoons about 166 million years ago, holding fossils of fish, mammals and reptiles. The formation carries the township's name and also crops out elsewhere on Skye.
The church that named the place is mostly gone. St Moluag's stands above the bay as a single random-rubble west gable, about 6.4 metres wide and five and a half high, topped by a stone pinnacle; the rest survives as turf-covered footings. A rector was recorded here in 1507, and the ruin probably sits over an older Celtic church. The parish moved to Kilmuir around 1600, and a mission church went up at Kilmaluag in 1935. Cill Moluaig — the cell of St Moluag — is what the Gaelic name still says.
For a wet afternoon, the Skye Museum of Island Life at Kilmuir keeps eight thatched cottages, one of them lived in until 1957; the Quiraing is about four miles south, and the Uig Hotel serves Highland red deer, local seafood and haddock and chips. But the thing to do here is walk out to the point, where the old coastguard lookout is kept up as a bothy, and sit for a while watching the Minch for whatever surfaces.