Trumpan

Roofless church, open skies

The church at Trumpan has no roof. It stands open to the weather, about fifteen metres by six and a half, a lancet window still set in the east gable and a rough arched doorway in the north wall. Inside there is a font and a worn grave slab carved with a claymore, animals and foliage. In the burial ground stands the Priest Stone, about 1.3 metres tall, and another medieval slab showing a tonsured priest beneath a canopy, with a foliage cross and a long-stemmed chalice at his side.

This is the far north end of Waternish. The car park has a 360-degree outlook and no artificial lighting, which has earned it a Milky Way rating from Dark Sky Discovery. The viewing area has seating and a hard, slightly uneven surface. Step beyond it after dark and the ground turns wet and unlit.

Two tables in Stein

For food, Stein is nearby on the peninsula, where the Stein Inn sits on the shore of Loch Bay and dates from 1790; the inn describes itself as the oldest on Skye. Charlie, the owner, works both the front of house and the kitchen. The menu runs to fish chowder, a smoked-fish plate of salmon, herring, mackerel and smoked mussels, a warm goat's-cheese bonbon with Skye honey, and a haggis and black-pudding bonbon; when the weather allows, lobster, crab, langoustines and mussels come straight out of Loch Bay. Dogs and children are both welcome, and the garden tables look across the water to the Outer Hebrides.

Nearby in Stein is Loch Bay, a small seafood restaurant in a crofter's cottage that holds a Michelin star. Its fixed menu is called Skye Fruits de Mer and takes in bouillabaisse, twice-dived scallops and creel-caught langoustines; the langoustine pot-au-feu is the dish Michelin picks out. You book by enquiry and pay in advance, children must be at least twelve, and no alternative menu is available for guests who cannot eat the fish and shellfish menu.

Lochbay's working tannery

Also at Lochbay is Skyeskyns, the only commercial sheepskin tannery left in Scotland, still working with machinery from the 1920s and 1930s. The tour is free and needs no booking, and the seasonal YURTea café does coffee, bakes and soup. Clive and Lydia Hartwell started the business in the 1980s by learning to tan discarded sheepskins.

The long walk to Waternish Point

The long walk from the church car park runs out to Waternish Point: eight and a half miles there and back, past the Iron Age broch of Dùn Borrafiach, whose walls still stand more than ten feet high, and the more ruinous Dùn Gearymore, to a solar-powered lighthouse and open water where whales and dolphins are sometimes seen. Much of the track is boggy and the final stretch has no path at all. Keep dogs on leads across the croft land.

Fire, battle and Lady Grange

The church earned its place in the histories on the first Sunday of May 1578, when raiders set it alight while MacLeods worshipped inside; local people caught and defeated them nearby, and the burial of the bodies in a dyke gave the battle its name, the Battle of the Spoiling Dyke. Rachel Chiesley, Lady Grange, is thought to lie in the churchyard too, abducted from Edinburgh in 1732 and held out in the islands until her death thirteen years later. From captivity she wrote that she was "not guilty of eny crime except that of loveing my husband to much."