The Isle of Skye is the largest of the Inner Hebrides, and its northern spine looks like nowhere else in Britain. Along the Trotternish ridge a wall of leaning pinnacles, terraces and hidden green hollows runs for thirty kilometres. The best-known is the Old Man of Storr, a 55-metre finger of rock left standing when the slope fell away around it. All of it is the largest landslip in Britain, and part of it is still moving — below the Quiraing the coast road cracks and slumps a few centimetres a year, and crews re-lay it most summers. The other great range is the Black Cuillin, the roughest mountains in Britain: a horseshoe of dark gabbro that is all that is left of a volcano's magma chamber. Skye has no gentle middle ground; the moor is soft and green, and then the rock starts.
Skye is 1,656 square kilometres and its landmarks are spread wide: pinnacle country north up the Trotternish peninsula, the Cuillin and its glens in the south, sea cliffs out west. Crossing between them takes hours on single-track roads, so Skye is not a one-day island; every bend turns up a new loch, a roadside waterfall or sheep asleep on the warm tarmac. The light shifts by the hour: grey and streaming one moment, sharp green and gold the next, so the same view rarely looks the same twice in a day. At the foot of the Cuillin the Fairy Pools step down the hillside in clear aquamarine basins that cold-water swimmers wade between. On the western tip a path drops to the white Neist Point lighthouse, on sea cliffs above the Atlantic sunset. White-tailed eagles, Britain's largest bird of prey, work the coast. Skye now draws far more visitors than its lanes were built for. In summer the passing places fill and the walk up to the Storr has a queue on it.