Struan

Food, books and working Struan

Bog Myrtle sits behind a window full of sea, its sofas velvet and its furniture mismatched, its shelves stocked with second-hand books. It is a café, a bakery and a bookshop at once. Mania Pietrzak-Clarke and her husband John run it, and before Struan they had Skye Bakehouse, so the sourdough and cakes came with them. In 2022 the designer Banjo Beale redesigned the café for the BBC Two series Designing the Hebrides, which is how it came to be on television. The kitchen ranges wider than the setting suggests, with dishes that have included spicy Moroccan harira, a Scottish Reuben built from Great Glen venison salami and Comté on sourdough, and Burmese chicken curry with lemongrass and jasmine rice. Family friendly.

Struan is a dispersed crofting community strung along Loch Beag, an inner arm of Loch Bracadale on Skye's west coast. It has no centre so much as a scatter of houses, a shop, a church and a few working businesses. The shop, at Struanmore, is the only one, and the Post Office lives inside it: mail, a little banking, bill payments. At Balgown, Neil and Helen Urquhart have made outdoor clothing under the name Cioch since 1988, cutting and sewing individual garments on the spot.

Dun Beag: stone and stories

The reason most people stop, though, stands on a rocky knoll just outside the village. Dun Beag is one of the best-preserved brochs on Skye, a drystone tower more than three metres high now, its internal diameter about eleven metres, its walls more than four metres thick. A stone stair still climbs twenty surviving steps inside the wall, and the whole thing may once have stood around ten metres. Samuel Johnson came up here in the 1770s, when circular structures still stood inside the tower, and decided it had been built to shelter cattle during raids; those inner buildings have since gone. Between 1914 and 1920 Countess Vincent Baillet de Latour dug the broch out, and what she found ran from a gold ring and old coins to a crucible, a bone borer, an antler pick and carbonised oats. The approach from the A863 is short but partly steep, over sheep-grazed ground. Wear proper boots.

Churches and carved memory

The churches are quieter draws. Struan Free Church at Struanmore is a plain whitewashed rectangle, put up soon after the Disruption of 1843. At Balgown, the old burial ground holds two grave slabs carved with claymores and foliage, and a third with a warrior in a surcoat cut in high relief, on ground thought to cover the foundations of a medieval chapel.

Roads to castle and pub

The old Struan Inn near the shore is a Category C listed 19th-century cottage-type building recorded as having been built as an inn. There is no railway anywhere on Skye; Kyle of Lochalsh, on the mainland, is the nearest station. The A863 runs past toward Dunvegan, about fifteen minutes by car, with Dunvegan Castle a little beyond it; Portree is about twenty-one minutes by car. For a pint you drive to Carbost, where the Old Inn has open fires, waterside seats on Loch Harport and three changing casks, with Talisker Distillery a hundred metres along the shore.

Tides and Talisker Bay

For walkers there is more coast than a short stay can cover: the tidal crossing to Oronsay from Ullinish, which is difficult and wants a tide table and careful timing, and Talisker Bay, an easy couple of miles to a sand-and-stone shore with a waterfall and a sea stack. Boswell, passing this way in 1773, wrote that "the billows break with prodigious force and noise on the coast of Talisker."