Sligachan

The hotel at the crossroads

Seumas' Bar, inside the Sligachan Hotel, keeps more than four hundred whiskies and is named after a dog. The Campbell family's Seumas was a regular on the premises, and the bar that carries his name was a finalist for Scotland's Whisky Bar of the Year in 2025. The present room dates from 1987, but the hotel behind it has been receiving climbers, walkers and travellers since the 1830s, when a new road bypassed the original inn at the head of the loch and the owners built the present hotel where the road now ran.

The road still passes the door. Sligachan sits at the crossroads of the A87 and A863, beside the River Sligachan at the head of Loch Sligachan. The settlement is small, with the hotel, a campsite whose reception has a seasonal shop, other accommodation, the bridge and an enormous quantity of mountain. Glen Sligachan opens south between two entirely different ranges. On one side the Black Cuillin rise dark and serrated, dominated from this spot by the pyramid of Sgùrr nan Gillean. On the other stand the rounder Red Hills, with Marsco and Glamaig for company.

Food and the Old Bridge

The bar serves Cullen skink with sourdough, battered haddock and chips, venison stew with roast potatoes, butter chicken and a red kidney bean curry. Its children's menu includes haddock goujons, a beef slider, chicken bites and cheese pasta. The hotel sources meat and fish locally and changes its dishes with the seasons. Well-behaved dogs are welcome inside, and a changing cask beer rounds out a stop between the Cuillin and the loch.

The old bridge is the obvious thing to photograph. It is early nineteenth century, built of rubble with dressed stonework, three broad shallow arches, triangular cutwaters and a low parapet that rises to a point at its centre. It has been listed since 1971.

Pioneers and the Glamaig wager

The climbing came next. Sligachan was a serious rock-climbing base by the late nineteenth century, and the two figures most tied to the Cuillin were the chemist Norman Collie and the Gaelic-speaking local guide John Mackenzie, whose names survive on the peaks Sgùrr Thormaid and Sgùrr Mhic Choinnich. A bronze sculpture of the pair by Stephen Tinney stands beside the path. Of their days together on the tops, Collie liked to say that "the good spirit of the mountain had been their unseen companion that day."

Not every visit ended so gently. In 1899 a soldier of the 5th Gurkha Rifles, Harkbir Thapa, answered a wager at the inn by running barefoot to the summit of Glamaig in thirty-seven minutes and back down in eighteen. His fifty-five-minute time stood for almost a century.

Walks and onward connections

You do not have to be a scrambler to walk here, though some of it demands it: Sgùrr nan Gillean is a grade-5 scramble, with real exposure and route-finding to match. Gentler is the long day up Sgùrr na Strì for its view over Loch Coruisk, or the shore path along Loch Sligachan toward the Braes. There is a good playpark for children and cover for wet afternoons, which Skye supplies freely. Portree and its shops are fifteen minutes north, Kyle of Lochalsh and the nearest railway a while beyond that, with the Stagecoach 52 stopping at the door.

The Allt Dearg belief

Local belief holds that if you dip your face in the nearby Allt Dearg for seven seconds and let it dry on its own, you are granted eternal beauty.