15.7.14

Nearly 5am

The last couple of days have been on Skye. It’s strangely pretentious here. A kind of contradiction; you are back in civilisation but not. And the food snobbery is pretty incredible. Sometimes it feels like there should be a bank statement check before you’re allowed in an establishment. Portree isn’t for our kind. It attracts a better class of holiday-maker—and for these people, holiday-maker seems the more appropriate term—than the rest of the Highlands, apparently. The place is particularly filmic. We saw lots from the car and not too much up close. The island has brutal, jagged peaks and countless waterfalls. A truly striking landscape. It feels more raw than the mainland; more stricken and exposed.

On our first night, maybe an hour after crossing the Skye bridge, we saw an impressive waterfall from the road and resolved to see it up close. It was a wet night and the winds were up but we figured it wouldn’t be a major detour, so we parked up and headed across the road. It was obvious not long into our walk that we’d underestimated the effort that‘d be required to make the waterfall. The terrain was boggy and wet and the hill itself had a constant stream of shallow water running down it. Each footstep was a matter of faith.

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