An island tour

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There's a ferry from Sconser on Skye to the isle of Raasay. We arrived at the jetty to find that we'd just missed the 1130 sailing, and the timetable showed a wait of 90 minutes for the next. That would leave us too little time before the last return boat, so we decided to save Raasay for another day.

Instead, we toured the north of Skye by car. From a clifftop viewing point, we looked down on the remnants of buildings in which diatomite was stored and dried? This white mineral was used in the 19th Century for insulating ships' boilers, filtration of beer and in the manufacture of gunpowder.

We stopped for coffee in a small cafe next to a community-run shop near Staffin Bay. In the passageway between the two, on the door to a hall hung a sign asking for quiet because the 2012 Olympic badminton team was practising inside.

The narrow, rolling road led us past huge rock hills and the clifftop ruins of Duntulm Castle. By Kilmuir, we passed the grave of Flora Macdonald, who helped Bonnie Prince Charlie flee to Skye after the Jacobites were defeated at Culloden in 1746 and who lived for 12 years in North Carolina. The grave was at the site of the Museum of Skye Island Life, housed in a cluster of thatched croft houses, to which we decided to give a miss. A row of motor homes was parked at the entrance.

On the west side of the Trotternish peninsula, the Outer Hebrides loomed grey in the distance. Here the landscape was more featureless. At the end of the hairpin bends into Uig, we found only the ferry terminal and a few cafes that served it. Apart from a short stop to eat our sandwiches on a hillside of heather during a dry interval, we pressed on through the rain back to Kyle.

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