A food truck stands permanently in the upper car park at Lealt Falls, serving hot food to whoever has pulled off the A855 to look at the gorge. This is Constables, and for now it is the catering in Lealt, a crofting hamlet.
The gorge is the reason to stop. The River Lealt cuts a narrow, tree-lined channel before dropping to the Sound of Raasay, and a short path from the car park reaches Skye's first viewing platform beside a waterfall. From the formal viewpoints you look west to the Trotternish mountains and east across the Sound to the mainland; the shore directly below is Invertote Bay. Staffin Community Trust asks visitors not to go beyond the viewpoint, where the ground is very dangerous and people have been hurt.
What you are looking down on is industrial. Between 1900 and 1960 people dug and dried diatomite at Loch Cuithir, inland up the valley. The white powder was known locally as cailc, chalk, and a tramway carried it down the Lealt valley to Inver Tote, where it was ground and shipped from the coast. When the Ordnance Survey visited in April 1961 the works were being demolished. At the river's mouth a salmon station once operated; a 1994 survey found two hand winches, net-drying poles, a rubble bothy with a largely collapsed roof and a corrugated-iron store.
Two longer walks start from here. The track to Loch Cuithir is a little over six miles there and back, easy going on an old Land Rover route that passes the deserted township and follows the river inland past the remnants of the diatomite railway. Brothers Point, reached through the quiet township of Grealin, is four and a half miles return and ends at protected dinosaur footprints you may look at but not touch.
For a pub, the nearest is the Flodigarry Hotel to the north, where the whisky bar occupies a former billiards room and a terrace looks out over the ocean. The kitchen, under Miles Craven, cooks handmade venison haggis, hand-picked crab on a Scots Toast crumpet, halibut on the bone, and a sticky toffee pudding with Talisker toffee sauce; the scallops are hand-dived by Ben Oakes.
For everything else you drive four miles or so north to Staffin. Staffin Bay Stores is the community grocery, licensed, with public toilets and vegan and gluten-free choices. MacKenzie Stores at Stenscholl, run by Dave and Sonia, is the only filling station between Portree and Uig. The Hungry Gull, in the community hall, does potato cakes with vegan sausage and sriracha, a brunch muffin built on Lorne sausage and a potato scone, and a vegan haggis quesadilla. Nearby at Ellishadder is the dinosaur museum Dugald Ross founded in 1976, while still a teenager.
The A855 runs north thirteen miles from Portree and on to Staffin, with local Stagecoach buses running to Staffin; the nearest railhead is Kyle of Lochalsh.
The Gaelic name, An Leth-allt, means the divided burn, or the burn with one high bank. Standing at the platform, the water goes over the edge beside you.