Kilmuir

Croft Houses and a Working Landscape

Eight thatched cottages stand on the west side of northern Trotternish, their walls thick, their roofs turf and rush, some of their timbers driftwood. This is the Skye Museum of Island Life, and the low, hunched form of the buildings is not decoration but an answer to severe winter gales. One of the croft houses was lived in until 1957. The others — a byre, a smithy, a weaver's house, a ceilidh house, an old shop, a barn — hold the tools and furniture of a crofting life that was already vanishing when Jonathan MacDonald, a Kilmuir-born crofter, opened the place in 1965 to keep it from disappearing entirely. Children under fifteen come in free with an adult; it runs seasonally rather than year-round.

You should know before you come that Kilmuir is not a village in the usual sense. Don't expect a pub, a shop or a café. It is a scatter of crofts strung along the A855, open pasture and wind-exposed grazing above the sea, with the Outer Hebrides on the horizon to the west. For groceries, fuel, a bar meal or a takeaway you drive south to Uig, where Rankins Supermarket, the Uig Hotel and a filling station gather around the ferry bay. The hotel kitchen has served Scottish seafood chowder, haggis with neeps and tatties in a whisky-peppercorn sauce, west-coast mussels in white wine, and battered haddock; dogs are welcome in the bar but not the dining room.

Wild Coast and Island Memory

What Kilmuir has instead of amenities is walking, and a great deal of it. The Cave of Gold, Uamh Òir, is a mile and a half of rough, often muddy croft pasture from the road end at Bornesketaig, with cliff views and a final grass slope down to the cave that is steep enough to be dangerous when wet. Further north, the circuit out to Rubha Hunish reaches Skye's northernmost headland past a former coastguard lookout, with sea stacks, views towards Harris and the chance of dolphins, porpoises, whales or otters offshore. The opening stage of the Skye Trail runs the same coast to Flodigarry, boggy and demanding, passing the ruins of Duntulm Castle and the abandoned settlement of Erisco. None of these is a family stroll.

The old graveyard sits on the site of a 16th-century parish church, enclosed by a stone-and-lime wall dated 1832. Flora MacDonald is buried here. In 1746 she helped Charles Edward Stuart cross to Skye disguised as her servant, Betty Burke, after the defeat at Culloden; she was arrested for it, returned to the island, and died in 1790. Samuel Johnson's tribute to her is cut into the memorial. Nearby lie the Maclean burial enclosures, one with a moulded doorway dated 1793, a late-medieval slab carved with a knight's effigy, and a slab for Charles MacArthur, hereditary piper to the MacDonalds.

The Hall and the Souterrain

There is a community hall, Talla Chille Mhoire, in the former Kilmuir Basket Factory, which made osier baskets from 1908–09 until it closed in 1956; it now hosts music, talks, food events and ceilidhs when the programme allows. And there is Kilvaxter, just down the road, where in 2000 a farmer's collapsing lintel revealed an Iron Age souterrain — a curving underground passage some seventeen metres long, with massive lintels and a cobbled yard, now open to anyone willing to stoop.

Reaching Kilmuir

Getting here means the A855 and, in the summer months, the Stagecoach 57C, which links Portree and Uig with Kilmuir, Duntulm and Staffin on a much thinner Sunday timetable. The nearest railway is at Kyle of Lochalsh, back on the mainland.

A Royal Visit Remembered

The museum keeps small stories alongside the large ones. When the Duke and Duchess of York — later George VI and his Queen — called at a croft house in 1933, the family withdrew to their bedroom. Asked why, their young son said: "If my parents were to go to London, I do not think the Royals would come out to meet them."