Back from Skye

We had a wonderful time on Skye and the weather was most of the time perfect, warm and dry with cloudless blue skies. We travelled by bus via Inverness and Loch Ness and back via Loch Lomond and Glasgow, long journeys but taking in some incredible scenery, mountains, woodlands full of bluebells and waterfalls. You can read a haiku I wrote during the journey over on Spring Haiku, here.

Skye itself is quite a sizeable island, with a mountain range all of its own (the Cuillins) and stunning seascapes, with views that look over to other islands in the Inner Hebrides and also to the mountains of the Scottish mainland. The Cuillins are visible from every point on the island, it seems - below is the view from our B&B.....

Skye is a great place to go walking and also birdwatching. We walked through the woodlands and along the coast around Armadale, visited Rubha Phoil (more on that later in the week), walked from Orbost down the coast towards the Macleods Maidens, though we didn't manage to get close enough to get the best view of the seastacks. We also walked along the river Lealt into some very dramatic mountains.



We also spent time in Portree, the main town on Skye, which itself has some very nice walks and a small and lovely wild nature park.

We saw lots of birds, including white tailed sea eagles, a golden eagle, mergansers, buzzards, a peregrine, a raven, wheatears, stonechats and a group of gannets fishing plus getting good views of a number of birds normally only heard - willow warblers, whitethroats and cuckoos. The whole island seemed to be full of the songs of the willow warbler and cuckoo. The swallows seem to have settled in well for the summer in Skye! To find out more about birds on Skye, you can visit the Skye Birds website. Wonderful flowers too, woodlands full of bluebells (see the new banner image!), river banks thick with marsh marigolds, fields covered in lesser celandines, plus a few orchids and butterwort in the marshy places. We also saw lots of tadpoles in ponds and large puddles. Deer and rabbits too in the fields. No otters, whales or dolphins....

(All species that appear in lighter green are hyperlinked to pages describing them)

(I'm featured on A Handful of Stones today, here, nothing to do with Skye....)