Читать книгу The Isle of Skye. Graded walks and scrambles throughout Skye, including the Cuillin онлайн

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The name Sleat, derived from sleibhte, means an extensive tract of moorland, and so it is – a thumb of rugged, rocky, lochan-laden moorland, creased into a thousand folds wherein man has fought with the elements to fashion a living. Sleat is also regarded as ‘The Garden of Skye’ – although not without dissent, as many see the gardens as the product of an time in the Island’s history when clan chieftains succumbed to the rule of London, and rode roughshod over the lives and necessities of their tenants.

The appellation comes, too, from Sleat’s more sheltered environment, protected from the worst of the Skye winds, that allows beech, sycamore and exotic conifers to flourish alongside the more natural birch, alder and bramble. Indeed, as Alastair Alpin MacGregor says: ‘It is at bramble-time that one should visit Russet Sleat of the beautiful women’, a place once governed to a large extent by prosperous tacksmen who personally supervised the cultivation of their own particular farms. MacGregor records: ‘Slait is occupiet for the maist pairt be gentlemen, thairfor it payis but the auld deuteis, that is, of victuall, buttir, cheis, wyne, aill, and aquavite, samekle as thair maister may be able to spend being ane nicht…on ilk merkland.There is twa strenthie castells in Slait, the ane callit Castell Chammes, the uther Dunskeith’.