Which, when the sun shone, really did look tropical!
Even though it's called Coral Beach, it's not really coral, but rather crushed bleached skeltons of Red Coralline seaweed (also known as Maerl), which grows at about 1mm per year out on the reef by the island of Lampay.
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| View from up on the 'Ghrobain' looking towards the island of Lampay. At very low tides there is a causeway revealed allowing access to the island. |
We'd hoped to stop at Dunvegan Castle and Gardens, seat of Clan MacLeod, on the way home but turns out it closed on 15th October. So...
After lunch we headed to the most westerly point on Skye - Neist Point Lighthouse. The lighthouse, first lit on 1st November 1909, was designed by David Alan Stevenson and is now a Category B listed building, but since 1990 has been operated remotely from the Northern Lighthouse Board headquarters in Edinburgh.
From the very start at the car park there are impressive views of the surrounding cliffs, but the lighthouse itself can not be seen unless you walk around the cliff. After a steep climb down and a walk back up and around, the lighthouse comes into view.
On the way home, on the recommendation of iChum, we stopped at Glendale and popped into Skye Weavers. All their products are woven on bicycle pedal-powered looms in a small weaving shed next to their old croft house, a house that iChum and family spent many a summer in growing up.
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| Oma did need to explain to me how it actually all worked! |
It was lovely chatting to the guy whose now ran the weavers - he'd inherited the house from his parents who were friends with iChum's grandparents/aunt/uncle/something like that, hence the summers spent on Skye. They still had a couple of iChum's dad's original artwork hanging on their walls, and remembered the Mackenzie's fondly (from visitor book recordings!). Was lovely to make a bit of a connection, and see all their work of course.
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| Our wee home away from home (the white house further right) |
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