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

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A short way round the coastline you reach the Sound of Sleat, and Kylerhea, the place where drovers used to cross thousands of cattle each year to the mainland, at slack water, linked nose to tail, and the first tied to a rowing boat. It must have been a fascinating spectacle, the more so because, as Gavin Maxwell recounts in A Ring of Bright Water, the sound was visited from time to time each year by killer whales.

In the opposite direction you head around the coast to Broadford, through an area, still wooded, but not as densely as previously, that is part of an ancient Caledonian forest.

The hinterland of south-east Skye, between the A851 and the kyles, is wild, rugged and unforgiving, no place for noviciate exploration. With the benefit of experience, however, this rough terrain will provide hours of adventure, and stakes a worthy claim to the attention of all walkers who venture on to Skye.

WALK 1.1

Gleann Meadhonach, Loch a’Ghlinne and Dalavil

Start/Finish Roadside parking (limited) on minor road to Achnacloich (NG622068) Distance 12km (7½ miles) Total ascent 255m (835ft) – mostly on the return journey Map OS Explorer 412

Sleat is not renowned for an over-abundance of walking opportunity. Though possessing a fascinating coastline of rocky inlets and tiny beaches, the hinterland is a troubled landscape of heathery knolls and boggy, lochanridden moorland, punctuated sparsely by man’s efforts to win a living from it. That he often fails is evidenced by the ruined crofts and agricultural buildings that dot the scene, though some, as along this walk through Gleann Meadhonach to secluded Dalavil, are as a result of clearances carried out on the Island during the 19th century.