Spend the weekend…on the Isle of Skye

When Samuel Johnson and James Boswell passed through Skye on their celebrated tour of the Hebrides in 1773, they were disconcerted by the lack of Highlands customs. Where were the fierce clans, the costumes and the Jacobite sympathies they had expected? Instead, in the person of the clan chief, Alexander Macdonald, they found a cultivated old Etonian more interested in reciting Latin verses to his distinguished guests.

The visit did not go well. Johnson asked why he didn’t have a magazine of arms hidden in his cellar and Macdonald replied that it was so damp they would only rust. Johnson complained when the sugar was served without tongs for his tea the visitors left early, in high dudgeon, although things improved when they later met Flora Macdonald and she could relate how she had saved Bonnie Prince Charlie some decades before.

There has always been a complicated gap between expectation and reality when it comes to the Highlands; and perhaps nowhere more so on Skye which carries the burden of both a famous name and now, with a bridge, relative accessibility.