Today I ate Haggis… tales from the Isle of Skye

What a cracker of a day out in bonny Scotland. It ended in the Portree town square, where the Isle of Skye pipe band was practicing. Lots and lots of marching up and down in kilts, tootling on bagpipes – it really was the perfect end to the evening.



We’d arrived in Portree on the east coast of Skye after a bunch of driving – more about that later. After hitting up the tourist office to find a B&B we installed ourselves, then set off walking through the Scottish mist for town. After a turn around the port (where Grandpa Dave mentioned he’d been a few times before – actually, as we’ve traveled around he’s said that about pretty much every place of interest we’ve been to!!) we ended up in a very nice bar/restaurant. They couldn’t seat us at once, so directed us to the bar where we knocked the froth off a beer (save Indi) before they called us for dinner. Steak was on the menu, with chips and Haggis!! Already fortified with a pint of McEwan’s finest, I thought that sounded pretty good – and it was. A damn fine meal, washed down with a large glass of Aussie chardonnay. Feeling fully satiated we learnt from the landlord on the way out the door that the Skye Pipe Band was practicing in the town square – “Just follow the noise,” he said. True enough, there they were – brilliant.

How good is it? Here we are, in Skye, watered and fed with some outstanding vittles after a day on the heather, in the mist – topped off with bagpipes droning through the square as the sun set on the whitewashed buildings of Portree. Even Indi is now converted to the pipes.

We kicked off the day in Spean Bridge early, with the Glenfinnan viaduct (of Harry Potter’s Hogwart’s Express fame) in our sites – and we got a quick glimpse, but had to hot-foot it to Mallaig for the ferry to Skye. There were major roadworks on the single lane (with passing bays) road – and they were blasting…much to Indi’s amusement there were signs suggesting that they’d give “hoots” in the leadup to setting of an explosion… Ind went into a queer hyperactivity for the next ten miles, gibbering about “Hoooooot!” in the back seat all the way to Mallaig.

The weather closed in pretty much as we pulled into the queue to load our car onto the “bonny boat”, but that was fine – hey, it’s Skye!! After disembarking we rolled over the single-lane roads (please use the passing bays) to Broadford, plucking and empty Creelers restaurant from the guidebook (after entering and leaving a chocker bus-café moments earlier). The first of a couple of outstanding meals for the day. Dad had haddock. On we went to Dunvegan and the castle of the same name. Not only has this been the heartland of the Clan McLeod for 800 years, but the 30th chief still lives on the upper two floors of the castle. It’s also home to the Fairy Flag of Dunvegan, said to render anyone who waves it unbeatable in battle. The catch is that it can only be waved three times, and the McLeods have waved it twice!!

Indi capered around the gardens on the west-coast encampment before we once again took to the motor for the final leg of our day, over the Isle in the fog. We’d considered knocking Skye over in a day – but had we done so, rather than supping on Haggis and the pipes, we’d have still been driving. So the right choice was made, methinks!!

Indi says…

We took a ferry over to the Isle of Skye, then drove and had some interesting lunch – I had chicken Teddies, chicken shaped like teddy bears? Then we left for Dunvegan Castle. After walking ‘round a bit we saw the fairy flag. It’s really really really old, and bit tattered – that’s because people have cut off little bits of it for luck. There were two great chunks missing from it. Further on we discovered a dungeon. You couldn’t get down into, there were metal bars, but there were two “people” in there coughing and spluttering. Lots of people had chucked coins down there, so I did too. To further torture the “prisoners” food prepared in the kitchens was carried up the stairs past a slit in the wall to the dungeon so the prisoners cold smell but not taste.

In Portree we went for dinner and then we followed a noise to the town square where people were ‘hooting’ on bagpipes! They were very noisy – and there was one guy about fifty tapping his foot hugely. It was funny. It was the Pipe Major’s (band leader's) birthday, so the lead piper disobeyed instructions and played happy birthday to him! It was very funny.

Up the next day and off ‘home’ to Spean Bridge. We left Skye via the bridge to the mainland, then stopped at Eilean Donan Castle – very famous, though all of us were suffering a wee bit of gallery fatigue by now. Fortunately we were on the right end of two great talks on the history of the castle by an elderly female guide, and in the room above – her son. He was a strapping Scotsman and fairly belted out the information about life in the Banquet Hall, etcetera… He then proceeded to show us the height a kilt would have been correctly worn a few hundred years ago – and it was quite scary!!