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 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 preserve it.

Kilmuir is a scatter of crofts along the A855 rather than a conventional village centre. Open pasture and wind-exposed grazing rise above the sea, with the Outer Hebrides on the western horizon. Highland Deli serves coffee, tea, cakes and snacks in Kilmuir. For groceries and fuel, Uig lies south along the road, where Rankins Supermarket and a filling station stand near the ferry bay. Uig Hotel overlooks the bay; its menus have included Scottish seafood chowder, haggis with neeps and tatties in whisky-peppercorn sauce, west-coast mussels in white wine and battered haddock.

Wild Coast and Island Memory

Kilmuir's open landscape also draws walkers, though the coastal routes are demanding. 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

Talla Chille Mhoire occupies the former Kilmuir Basket Factory, which made osier baskets from 1908–09 until 1956; the hall hosts music, talks, food events and ceilidhs. At nearby Kilvaxter, a collapsed lintel exposed an Iron Age souterrain in 2000. Its curving underground gallery runs for about seventeen metres beneath massive lintels, with a cobbled yard and interpretation panels at the public-access site.

Reaching Kilmuir

Kilmuir sits on the A855. The Stagecoach 57C links Portree and Uig with Kilmuir, Duntulm and Staffin in summer; the published 2026 schedule has no Sunday journeys. The nearest railway is at Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland.

A Royal Visit Remembered

A croft-house story from 1933 captures the distance between island life and royal ceremony. When the Duke and Duchess of York — later George VI and Queen Elizabeth — came to see a family's house, the parents withdrew to their bedroom. Their son explained: "If my parents were to go to London, I do not think the Royals would come out to meet them."