Uig

Ferries and island-brewed beer

Once or twice a day a CalMac ferry pulls away from the pier at the bottom of Uig Bay and heads out across the Minch, bound for Lochmaddy on North Uist or Tarbert on Harris, each crossing a little under two hours. The bay is a near-perfect horseshoe on the north coast of Skye's Trotternish peninsula, looking west towards Waternish, and Uig gathers along its edge. Stay here and you will learn the ferry timetable whether you mean to or not.

Right by the pier is the Isle of Skye Brewing Company, which began in 1992 when a group of schoolteacher friends sat in a Skye pub complaining that the island had no beer of its own. "We'll just have to start our own brewery," one of them said, and they did. The first batch, Red Cuillin, was brewed in 1995 and is now called Skye Red; it won CAMRA Champion Beer of Scotland in 1997, and the brewery has collected more than sixty awards since. You can buy Skye Gold, Skye Black, Young Pretender and Skye IPA from the shop.

Pottery and the Ferry Inn

A short way along the bay, Uig Pottery has thrown hand-made stoneware since the same year. You can watch the resident potters at the wheel or painting, and the Celtic-knotwork quaichs can be personalised with a name and a date.

There are two inns to choose between. The Ferry Inn is small and warm, with a double-sided stove and a dining room of only five tables, where seasonal Scottish sharing plates come off an Inka charcoal oven: lamb croquettes, lángos, curried goujons of Scrabster haddock, Skye langoustine from Loch Bay Shellfish. Two handpulls carry ales brewed in Uig by the Isle of Skye Brewery during the season, with Skye Blonde and Cuillin Lager also on tap, and a house cocktail called Ferry On the Rocks. Well-behaved dogs are welcome in the bar; the resident dog is Mac, who shares his toys, water and treats but not his place by the stove.

Hotel tables and provisions

The Uig Hotel sits higher up, its restaurant, bar and sun lounge all facing the water. The kitchen leans on local produce — Highland red deer, home-smoked sea trout, chowder — alongside haddock with homemade chips, macaroni cheese and a beef burger. Dogs are fine in the bar and bedrooms, though not the dining room. The long-established Bakur Bar sits near the pier entrance.

For self-catering, Rankins is an independent supermarket carrying around seven thousand lines, with a fine-food range — imported Thai curry pastes, specialist curry sauces, cheeses from around the country — you would not expect of a village shop this far north. There is a filling station with a shop and takeaway near the terminal, and the Galley Café out at Earlish is spoken of for its scallops with Stornoway black pudding.

Towers, churches and woodland

Above the bay stands a roofless round tower of about 1850, built by Major Fraser of Kilmuir and lived in, at one point, by a gamekeeper. Two churches stand on the high ground above: the whitewashed Church of Scotland with its Gothic Y-tracery, and the square-towered Free Church of 1860-61, by Ross and Joass.

The woods here are worth the time. Uig Wood is temperate rainforest, a stand of broadleaves in a mostly treeless landscape, and the Shore Wood path runs flat and firm for six hundred metres with the bay in view. Steeper trails climb the Rha and Conon ravines to a two-stage waterfall and an old weir. Inland, past the Uig Hotel, the Fairy Glen folds itself into small grassy cones and lochans below the rocky knuckle of Castle Ewen.

The storm of 1877

In 1877 a storm destroyed Uig Lodge and the bridge over the River Conon, and scoured the graveyard so badly that bodies were left in the trees and out in the bay. The boulders it dragged down still sit near the shore, and the ferries still come and go nearby.