words by Williams

We’re on Skye - at the Camping and Caravanning Club site of the same name, just outside Edinbane at the top of what I think is Loch Greshornish. Our pitch is at the bottom of the site, facing out over the loch.

It’s on a 200-acre croft. There are Highland cattle - home from home for us then - those little black sheep with horns and KuneKune pigs, including around 10 piglets.

It’s on the west of the island, about 14 miles from Portree and eight miles from Dunvegan. 

We arrived yesterday and, it seems we got the best of the weather during the afternoon.

Right now, it’s tipping down. Last night was windy. Apparently, this is just the prelude to Hurricane Nigel heading our way.

I feel like we should be relatively sheltered from anything coming in from the south west, but the fact the opposite shore of the loch is just a blur in the sheeting rain suggests otherwise. Either way, we’re the middle one of three motorhomes on our patch, so hopefully there’s some protection.

We had planned to go on from here to Harris and Lewis by ferry, but we’re being warned of 50mph gusts so we actually booked and cancelled a site in Stornoway in a matter of hours.

Instead, we’ve decided on another day’s stay at this site.

Monday looks horrendous for travelling and the thought of being caught in gusty winds on the Skye Bridge only adds to my bridge phobia. It’s one of those really tall humpy bridges, not quite on the Pont de Normandie scale, but enough to induce my usual bridge terrors. Funnily enough, it looks flatter in pictures, so maybe the tall ridge I see is some kind of wuss-induced foreshortening.

From Fort William, we travelled to a small family-run campsite with curious free-range chickens at Ardelve, a few minutes up the road from Eilean Donan Castle. Not that the chickens were odd in any way, they just seemed to be really interested in how we charge the toilet cassette. Eilean Donan is said to be one of the most photographed castles in Scotland and you’ll know it from a few films. Cal wasn’t impressed though. “Not as spectacular as I’d imagined,” she said.

A couple staying on the site at Ardelve had come down from Inverness to attend a family wedding at the castle on Saturday. They were driving a customised Land Rover Defender towing a specially-built small caravan. The wedding planning was very much a family affair by all accounts. He’d supplied the wedding car and she had picked flowers from their own garden for the floral displays. I hope they had decent weather in the end.

We took a detour into Fort Augustus at the foot of Loch Ness on the way to Ardelve. Last time we were there was 15 years ago or thereabouts. Cal hadn’t really remembered it, but my lasting memory was of watching a then brand-new Skye lifeboat going through the locks on the Caledonian Canal.

At the Lock Inn, we were sitting having a quiet drink when we were joined by Heather, a retired history teacher from New York. From what she told us, we worked out she must be in her mid-70s. She was travelling solo, visiting Glasgow and Inverness. She liked to travel and she liked to harmonise with traditional songs in pubs, she said. She was heading south on her tour bus to catch a flight home on Monday.

This tiny, chatty grey-haired lady wrapped in a tartan shawl held together by a Scottish-style brooch, announced herself by letting us know we were sat at her table (for six) and, far from asking us to leave, she asked us to stay, then proceeded pretty much to give us a potted life story as she ate her soup.

Heather was clearly embracing Scotland. She said that as a girl being called Heather was rare and singled her out. "I wanted to be a Mary, or an Anne," she said. "Now I've seen heather and I like it."

She’d taught for 57 years and only gave it up because she felt she was being disrespected by the woman who controlled appointments in her school board. She liked to teach history ‘honestly’, which meant she always started America from the point of view of native Americans, not European settlers, she said.

She added that most school history seems to be selective, missing out the bits - and here I paraphrase a bit - where we might come across as thieving sectarian racist imperialists.

Tiny though she was, probably standing less than 4ft 6in, you get the feeling Heather was - and still is - one of the feisty ones.

Incidentally, I was wondering if we should take a trip to Dunvegan. It would kind of complete a journey for me. Dunvegan in Alberta’s Peace River country was one of the places I visited when I was a Rotary Club exchange student in the 1970s. Apparently there’s a campground there now, close to the Fort Dunvegan historic site, so visiting Dunvegan Castle on Skye would be quite fitting.

Other than Heather’s soup, I’ve not really talked food in this blog, but our meal at the Edinbane Inn yesterday evening was outstanding. For mains Cal had ‘melt-in-the-mouth’ feather blade of steak in a rich sauce with creamy mash and I had fresh Skye haddock and chips. Cal had sticky toffee pudding for dessert and I had Talisker whisky panacotta with a fruit compote.

Well worth the mile walk either way.

Here’s a warning, though, you’ll have to book early to secure a table. They only serve between 5.30pm and 8.30pm.