Kilmarie

Wool, fort and cairn on the Dùn Ringill path

An ornate footbridge crosses the Abhainn Cille Mhaire just below Kilmarie House, and the path beyond it runs a mile and three-quarters out to Dùn Ringill and back. It is short — three kilometres, an hour or so, only twenty-seven metres of climb — but the ground is honest about where you are: clear underfoot in places, boggy in others, with a stretch of pebble beach before the fort. In 2022 a crofter named John MacRae trialled a repair on one of the wet sections by laying quarry gravel over raw wool. "I used 300 fleeces in a 80 metre section," he said. The fleeces float, and were intended to keep the stone from sinking into the peat.

Dùn Ringill waits at the far end, a possible Iron Age broch enclosing an oval roughly seventy-two by fifty-eight feet, its north-west entrance still holding the door checks and bar holes. This was the seat of Clan Mackinnon before they moved to Castle Moil at Kyleakin, and later builders reused its lintels in lime-mortared masonry and set a rectangular medieval building inside the older ring. The circuit back passes more stone remains, the twin summits of Blà Bheinn, and the Cnocan nan Cobhar chambered cairn, grassy and overgrown now but counted one of the better examples on Skye.

Camasunary paths and Elgol boats

The village itself is small: a scatter of buildings in Strathaird, beside the river and near the shore of Loch Slapin, with Blà Bheinn standing behind. From just past Strathaird a longer path, about nine kilometres out and back, reaches Camasunary Bay under the Cuillin without asking you to climb anything, and from there the routes carry on towards Loch Coruisk and the Black Cuillin for anyone who wants them.

Keep on down the single-track B8083 to Elgol, and the Mackinnon family have been taking boats out to Loch Coruisk since 1969. Misty Isle Boat Trips — Seumas Mackinnon, his wife Anne, their sons and grandchildren — crosses beneath the Cuillin past seals, eagles and porpoises, sometimes dolphins or a minke whale, and lands you for a short walk in to the loch.

Broadford supper

For dinner you go the other way, out to Broadford, where the B8083 meets the A87. The Broadford Hotel's Spinnakers Bar takes walk-ins and non-residents and cooks Skye produce: Cullen skink, Loch Eishort mussels in white wine and garlic, Isle of Skye tempura scallops with a Talisker whisky jus, Highland venison haunch with potato gratin, and cranachan to finish.

Kilmarie House and Cille Mhaire burial ground

Kilmarie House was home until 1994 to Ian Anderson, the singer and flautist of Jethro Tull; that year the John Muir Trust bought the surrounding Strathaird estate from him. Above the shore, the Cille Mhaire burial ground is still in use, on the site of a church that has vanished but whose foundations turned up while graves were being dug in the crowded north-west corner. Even its saint is unsettled — one account of 1845 gave it to St Mary, another of 1863 to St Maelrubha.

Bus links and Amy's Place

The nearest railway is at Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland, and the Stagecoach 55 stops at Kilmarie on weekdays, linking it with Torrin, Broadford, Elgol and Kyleakin, though the timetable shifts with school terms and Fridays. Back along the road at Torrin, Amy's Place fills the former Blue Shed Café: fourteen seats indoors and more outside, looking across Loch Slapin to Blà Bheinn, with homemade cakes and soup, including cakes made on site. Mark and Alison Carter named it for their daughter Amy, who died in 2018 aged twenty-three after living with lupus and epilepsy. The purple paint and the butterflies are for her.