Skeabost

Whisky and dinner by Loch Snizort

The whisky bar at Skeabost House has a fireplace, a wall of malts and a short list of local gins, and you can order a flight and drink it looking out at Loch Snizort. The bar sits inside a white, towered mansion on the shoreline. It is dated 1871, probably with an earlier core, with work by Alexander Ross around 1870–71, and it still carries the square crenellated tower, glazed cupola and cast-iron sun room from that time.

Dinner is served next door in the West Pier restaurant, which faces the loch and has a terrace for eating outside when the weather allows. The spring menu runs to seared Scottish scallops with cauliflower textures and leek ash, loin of Highland venison with truffled mash and beetroot, and West Coast hake with a hazelnut crust, melting potatoes and warm tartare sauce. Pudding includes a chocolate-and-Talisker mousse with raspberry. Lighter plates cover a ham-hock-and-mustard terrine, a braised-beef sandwich with smoked cheddar, and a lemon-curd tartlet. Anne, Jennifer, Matthew and the Skeabost team sign the menu at its foot.

Portree links and onward travel

Skeabost has no shop to speak of, so for bread, milk and everything else you drive or take the bus to Portree, which the Stagecoach 56 and 56X reach from the Skeabost Hotel stop in ten to seventeen minutes. The same buses run the other way to Edinbane and Dunvegan, and some carry on to Dunvegan Castle if you want to make a half-day of it. The village sits on the A850, a couple of miles west of the Portree road; the nearest railway is at Kyle of Lochalsh, about forty miles off by road.

St Columba's Island

From the hotel a short constructed path leads to the river. A footbridge crosses the River Snizort onto a low island, once described by antiquaries as a group of five or six chapels. What survives is a small teampull dedicated to St Columba and the grass-grown mounds of a much larger church, together with generations of clan graves. In 1795 the Old Statistical Account called the place a former habitation of monks and priests, and the same account named it the "metropolitan church of the whole island of Skye." It was, for a time, a bishops' seat.

Nicolson's Aisle

The most-visited corner is Nicolson's Aisle, held by tradition to be the resting place of twenty-eight MacNeacail chiefs. Inside lies a sixteenth-century warrior effigy in a conical helmet, his sword pointing down. When the ruined chapel was stabilised in the early 1990s, broken wine glasses and bottles turned up around it, which the clan reads as traces of "a liberal and liquid farewell." In 2018 another carved marker of a sword-bearing soldier came to light beside the aisle.

Fishing and core paths

The River Snizort is Skye's main salmon river, and the hotel controls the fishing along its twelve beats, selling permits from 11 February to 15 October. There is no fishing on a Sunday. If you would rather walk than cast, tarred tracks link Skeabost to Carbost and on towards Borve, quiet lanes that end where the graves begin.