Staffin

Catch, crofts and brunch

At Garafad, on the road north out of Staffin, there is a vending machine that sells langoustines. The prawn tails and whole langoustines inside come off a boat called the Dunan Star II, packed within hours of landing and ready either to eat as they are or to take home and cook. What is in stock depends on the weather and on what the boat brought back, which is the general condition of a great many things here.

You should understand before arriving that Staffin is not a village with a single street to park on and walk down. It is a crofting district of more than five hundred people spread across twenty-three townships around Staffin Bay, in Gaelic An Taobh Sear, sitting at the seaward foot of the Trotternish Ridge. The ridge is the long broken wall you will see above the crofts almost everywhere, and the bay is a green crescent of in-bye croft land between dark cliffs and the sea, with Staffin and Flodigarry islands offshore and long views across to Raasay, Rona and the mainland. Getting your bearings means learning the names of places rather than the corners of a high street. You reach it on the A855, sixteen miles north of Portree, and you will find yourself driving between named townships all week.

Food is more specific and more interesting than the scattered layout suggests. The Hungry Gull is a family-run brunch café inside Talla Stafainn, the community hall, serving locally roasted coffee, home baking and filling brunch plates under displays of Highland art and craft. The kitchen runs to potato cakes with vegan sausage, spinach and sriracha; a brunch muffin stacked with Lorne sausage, potato scone and fried egg; a vegan-haggis quesadilla; a black-pudding toastie; and a French toast that changes.

Coffee, supplies and the district's hotel bar

A short way off, the café at the Columba 1400 leadership centre does homemade soup, toasties, home baking, coffee and lunch, with a terrace and the useful distinction that what you spend goes back into the charity's work with young people. Down at Staffin Harbour, beside An Corran, Corran Coffee took a five-year lease in 2026 under Andi Dunkel and Paul Milne, who roast small batches of ethically sourced beans from Uganda, Rwanda and Colombia and sell coffee, cakes and baked goods rather than hot meals. The house blend, An Corran, mixes African and Colombian beans and is described by the roaster in terms of brown sugar, lime and chocolate. The harbour is community-owned, so the rent flows back into it, and the business supports seven jobs. Dunkel calls the place, without embellishment, "a wee café at the harbour."

For groceries, the shop in the community hall is listed as Staffin Stores in one place and Staffin Bay Stores in another; either way, it carries bread, milk, tinned food, fruit and vegetables, toiletries, pet food, newspapers, firewood, beer and spirits, and vegan and gluten-free choices, with a laundry in the same building. At Stenscholl, Dave and Sonia's MacKenzie Stores sells groceries, meat, alcohol and newspapers, and runs the only fuel pumps on the whole road between Portree and Uig, which is the sort of fact worth filing away before you set off across the north of the island.

Staffin itself has no standalone pub, no room you can just walk into for a pint. The nearest thing to a bar in the wider district is the lounge and whisky bar at the Flodigarry Hotel, north of the centre, set in the hotel's former billiards room with sea views, a whisky selection, and a terrace and garden to take a drink outside. It is a hotel bar rather than a village local. The restaurant, under executive chef Miles Craven, leans hard on Skye and Highland produce: Ben Oakes's hand-dived Skye scallops, thirty-five-day-matured Highland beef, Skye venison and Kilmuir lamb. Lunch runs to a haggis Scotch egg with whisky mustard, baked Morangie brie, the Crofter's Lunch, and a sticky toffee pudding with Talisker toffee sauce and whisky ice cream; dinner to halibut on the bone with smoked-haddock brose, a hand-dived Sconser scallop with bacon-wrapped pork, and centre-cut beef sirloin alongside a short-rib bridie. Dogs are allowed in the bar.

From An Corran to the high ridge

The reason people come is mostly on foot and above the crofts. The gentlest introduction is the four-kilometre circuit from Columba 1400 down to the slipway and An Corran, which crosses the former church glebe, passes an Iron Age chambered cairn, reaches the working slipway and the shore, and returns along the Stenscholl River, where you may see otters. This is the beach with the dinosaur footprints. They can appear around mid-tide after a storm has stripped the sand back, and they are just as often buried under sand and seaweed; when they are visible, the request is simply that you do not stand in them.

The famous walk is the Quiraing, six and a half kilometres and three to four hours, past the pinnacles known as the Prison, the Needle and the Table, with the bay laid out below and the mainland peaks of Beinn Alligin and Slioch beyond. The path under the cliffs starts well and turns rocky and rough, with a short scramble and an exposed return over the escarpment in bad weather. There is no bus to the high-road start; the nearest stop is about three kilometres away at Brogaig, and the Stagecoach 57C that links Portree, Staffin, Flodigarry and Uig runs only across the summer season and never frequently enough to treat casually. Shorter and rougher, the walk to Brothers' Point from Culnacnoc goes past ruined crofts and a former salmon-net station before climbing steeply above vertical drops towards Dùn Hasan, an old settlement site later used as a fortress, with Kilt Rock in the distance. The trackways there include prints left by stegosaurs, among the oldest such evidence known anywhere.

If you want the industrial story instead, the track from Lealt to Loch Cuithir follows the line of a diatomite railway for eleven kilometres, past lazy-bed cultivation, fragments of rail and broken bridge crossings, to the loch below Sgùrr a' Mhadaidh Ruaidh. The Trotternish ridge stage of the Skye Trail, from Flodigarry to the Storr, is a different order of undertaking altogether, arduous and pathless, and belongs to experienced, well-equipped hillwalkers rather than to an afternoon out.

Footprints and the crofters' fight

The footprints are the thread that runs through Staffin's more recent story. In 2001 two local dog walkers, Cathy and Paul Booth, noticed a single three-toed print at An Corran; the palaeontologist Neil Clark and the local collector Dugald Ross went on to identify seventeen more, attributed to Megalosaurus and dated to about a hundred and sixty-five to a hundred and sixty-six million years. Ross had begun collecting fossils in 1976, while still a teenager, and built from that the Staffin Dinosaur Museum at Ellishadder, whose holdings include what National Museums Scotland describes as Scotland's first dinosaur bones. The prints are now legally protected: after someone tried to take a plaster cast of one in 2016 and damaged it, a 2019 Nature Conservation Order made removing or damaging Skye's important fossils an offence, signed at the museum by the Scottish minister Mairi Gougeon. Ross's own summary of what a visitor should do with a find is worth carrying up the beach: "find, report and help protect – but not collect."

The land itself was fought over more recently than the dinosaurs might suggest. During the crofting agitation of the 1880s Staffin's twenty-two townships held meetings in the open near Kilt Rock, between Bhaltos and Ealaiseadar, where an outdoor gathering exposed no single household to a landlord's reprisal; later meetings at the Quiraing and Loch Mealt drew hundreds, and the movement fed into the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886. The Sùil nam Brà memorial at Kilt Rock, its name meaning "the eye of the quernstone," records this, and links land protest to the earlier suppression of the querns crofting households used to grind their own grain. It was advocated by the late Lachie Gillies, designed by the artist Henry Castle and built by the mason Hector Macleod; among the campaigners it remembers is Norman Stewart, known as "Parnell."

Older layers beside the bay

Older layers sit under all of this. People have used this landscape for more than eight thousand years, a span made plain when road blasting at An Corran in the early 1990s cut into a shell midden and turned up bone and stone tools with a red-deer bone dated to some seven and a half thousand years ago. Diatomite was dug beside Loch Cuithir from the 1880s, dried from grey-green to white and run down to the coast by tramway to end up in toothpaste, matches and paint, until the industry faded and left only the broken railway. On 3 March 1945 an American B-17, flying towards Italy, struck Beinn Edra in cloud and killed all nine men aboard; a plaque bearing their names was added to the war memorial in 2015, and the wreckage is still on the hill. The parish church, Kilmuir and Stenscholl, is a whitewashed T-plan building of 1828, one of Thomas Telford's Parliamentary churches, with a birdcage belfry and its original pulpit inside; a community renovation finished in 2020 gave it heritage space alongside worship and a home for Staffin Community Trust, the body that was formed in 1994 as the population fell and now owns the harbour, the only community-owned harbour in north Skye, with Gaelic kept firmly at the centre of its work.

Which returns you to the shore below the pinnacles. The same stretch of An Corran that draws people for its footprints once held salmon bothies and net-drying poles, and out in the bay, within living memory, cattle were swum roughly a hundred metres across to graze Staffin Island, a crossing supervised by a man remembered as Iain "The Herd" MacDonald. It is a small thing to picture, a line of cattle in the water and someone counting them off, in a place the brochures sell almost entirely on the size of its cliffs.