Portnalong

Loch Harport and a Crofting Settlement

The road ends at Portnalong pier, at the edge of Loch Harport, where the B8009 runs out past Carbost and there is nowhere further to drive. The village behind it is scattered rather than clustered — crofts spread across rough pasture and moor at the end of the Minginish peninsula, with the water in front and the hills beyond it. Across the loch you can pick out Macleod's Tables and, further round, the Cuillin. On a still morning the shoreline is a place to watch for otters or a sea eagle.

The houses tell you how the place began. Portnalong was laid out in the 1920s for families of Lewis and Harris ex-servicemen, mainly from Point, who had been promised land at home and were given crofts here instead — sixty-eight of them, carved out of the former Talisker sheep farm. The first arrivals lived in wooden huts, then built their own houses with poured-concrete gables and corrugated-iron walls. The novelist Neil Gunn saw them soon after and wrote that "they are freshly painted or whitewashed, look very well and fit into the landscape." A 1929 Daily Mail report called the settlement a remarkable success.

Port na Skye and Carbost Tables

They brought their looms with them. Cloth woven on Skye could not be sold as Harris Tweed, so they marketed it as "Port na Skye" to steamship passengers who came in to the pier, and the school held an annual show. The name of the village is older and plainer: port for harbour, long for ship.

The nearest supplies are three miles back at Carbost, where the community shop — not-for-profit, five staff, run by Linda Rae — sells local beer and gin, sandwich makings, refill stations for dry goods and shampoo bars, and stocks the Isle of Skye Black Pudding Company. Café Cùil, in the same village, is the work of Skye-born chef Clare Coghill: Highland shakshuka with veggie haggis, Lochalsh beef-brisket rarebit, smoked mackerel on sourdough with seaweed sauerkraut and crowdie, pancakes with rhubarb and gorse-flower mascarpone. The Old Inn sits on the loch at Carbost, a dog-friendly free house with local ales, whiskies, outdoor seating and live music. Talisker, Skye's oldest working distillery, has stood on the shore since 1830 and runs tours and tastings, though children under eight are not allowed on them.

Art and the Tin Church

Back in Portnalong, Loch Harport Gallery is a two-minute walk and shows etchings, prints and watercolours by the local artist Jean Thomas. The old mission church has become something else again — a corrugated-iron chapel converted to a house by Nick Thomson and Caroline Dear, who kept the tin exterior and timber frame and cut a large glazed opening into the south wall.

The Walk to Dun Ardtreck

The best walk starts at the pier. The circuit out to Dun Ardtreck and Ardtreck Point is about three miles, an hour and a half or two, over grassy paths and boggy moor beside unprotected cliff edges; take care, and keep dogs on leads through the grazing. At the far end is a D-shaped semi-broch, roughly two thousand years old; when it was dug in 1964-65 the finds included Roman Samian pottery and part of a melon bead. For something gentler there is Talisker Bay, an easy walk down to sand, a sea stack and a waterfall.

Road, Bus and Community Hall

Getting here means the A863 and then the B8009 through Carbost; there is no railway on Skye, and the mainland trains stop at Kyle of Lochalsh. A single bus, MacDonald's Coaches route 608, connects the village with Carbost, Sligachan and Portree a few times on weekdays. The community hall, opened in 2009, keeps a garden and polytunnel, a heritage group and a café going. In 2018 it hosted a waulking of local wool, thirty-odd songs over three hours to soften the cloth by hand — the same work the first crofters carried here in their luggage, done for an afternoon in the same room.