Skye: Against the Odds Grand Tours of the Scottish Islands

The island of Skye. In Gaelic, Eilean a' Cheo.

The island of mist, long famed in myth and legend.

According to song and tradition, the time-honoured way of reaching

the island is to take a boat over the sea to Skye.

I've always been drawn to islands, and in this series,

I'm setting out to discover the magic

of Scotland's amazing island riches.

There are over 280 offshore islands big enough to lay claim to the name

and that's not counting the myriad of stacks

and skerries that surround 6,000 convoluted miles of coast.

In this programme,

I'm exploring the neighbouring islands of Skye and Raasay,

where some communities have won and others lost,

in the struggle for survival.

Lying just off the West Coast across the famous Kyle of Lochalsh,

Skye is the second largest island in Scotland

and has a growing population of nearly 10,000.

But neighbouring Raasay struggles to hold on to its population,

which has shrunk to less than 200.

But island life has never been easy.

Technically, Skye ceased to be an island in 1992

with the opening of the controversial Skye Bridge

which spans the narrow waters of the Kyle of Lochalsh.

In the old days, car ferries shuttled back and forth

across the kyle, carrying locals and, of course, tourists, who have

become such an important part of the island's means of economic survival.

But in 1968, the ferry could only take four cars at a time.

As a result, you could wait for hours just to get across.

The solution was to build a bridge, and seeing from the water

the transforming effect of this fixed link really strikes home.

Now, people drive over the sea to Skye.

Up to 20,000 cars and their passengers on a busy day.

The bridge doesn't cross the kyle in a single leap,

it hops across, and the place where it rests its legs for a while

is Eilean Ban, an island with a unique story to tell.

-Hi, Julie.

-Welcome to Eilean Ban.

Julie helps run the Eilean Ban Trust which takes care of the island.

As a tour guide, she is well acquainted with

the historical significance of these waters.

Way back when the Vikings were here,

it was a very important area for them to come through these narrows

because it was much safer than right out there in the Outer Minch.

-There's also a legend, Saucy Mary.

-Saucy Mary?

-Yeah, well...

-Was she saucy?

-I really couldn't say.

She was allegedly a Norwegian princess who

lived in the old ruined castle over there, and the legend goes

that she had a chain which she stretched across from Kyleakin

to Kyle and she wouldn't let anybody else by without them paying a toll.

Which is rather ironic, really,

-because when they first built the bridge...

-They had a toll.

-They had a toll.

-I remember.

-It was very expensive, yes.

For many years, Eilean Ban was inhabited by lighthouse keepers

and their families.

After they left in the 1960s, the author and naturalist,

Gavin Maxwell, bought the island shortly before he died.

He'd risen to fame with the book and the film,

Ring of Bright Water, which told the story of his life with otters.

Julie's colleague, Margaret Scott, shows me around Maxwell's

former home, which is now a museum to a remarkable life.

-Right, so this is where he lived.

-Yes.

-Wow, what a fantastic room.

It is, isn't it?

It's where he lived for the last 18 months or so of his life and he

wanted it to be a long room, a long sitting room to entertain friends.

So he knocked two rooms together.

It's not what you'd expect on a wee island,

to see something quite as grand as this, Margaret.

-It's almost sumptuous really, in a way.

-It is.

He was an aristocrat and people forget that.

They think he was a down-and-out writer.

So he had blue blood running through his veins?

Yes, blue blood.

-His mother was the daughter of the Duke of Northumberland.

-Really?

-Yes.

-So he was really very posh then.

-Yes, very posh.

-Hence the antiques.

-Yes.

Despite being born with a silver spoon in his mouth,

Maxwell was always hard up,

often scrounging off relatives and even staying with chums

for months on end, dreaming up unlikely schemes for making money.

He had this idea of going fishing for basking sharks.

He made quite a lot of money but, as usual, he did it for about

two and a half years.

He had a fishery on the Island of Soay, just off Elgol

on the west coast of Skye and eventually he lost all his money.

To think how he loved animals and yet he could go

and stick these awful things into basking sharks...

That is the aristocracy for you, isn't?

They love animals, but they shoot them.

-They do.

-Hunting, shooting and fishing.

Hunting, shooting and fishing, yes.

Among the other mementos to an adventurous life, is this

photograph of Maxwell behind the wheel of his fabulous Bentley

racing car at Silverstone.

And in this cabinet, the remains of an ornate service revolver.

During the war, he was employed by the MoD to train

people in the Special Operations Executive,

-to sort of look after themselves behind enemy lines.

-Right.

So this gun was actually given to him

by the Norwegian Government and this is actually a James Bond type gun,

-because it goes into a thing like a pen.

-Really?

-Yes.

You're supposed to be able to make it into a gun, a useful gun,

in 30 seconds in the dark.

But I've never tried it.

At one time, Maxwell turned his hand to painting,

trying but failing to earn a crust as a society portrait artist.

That's an interesting portrait.

This is Kathleen Raine and she was a big influence on Maxwell's life.

She fell in love with him really and was in love with him all her life.

Were they lovers?

No, because he was actually gay, so it was never reciprocated.

Although he did marry. He married another friend.

-Here's a complex man.

-A very complex man, yes.

Who was that character there, that young girl?

We don't actually know and it's not a young girl, it's a young boy.

Right. Was it a muse figure?

We just don't know, it is just one of those mysteries.

-What sort of man do you think he was?

-Troubled.

He just couldn't settle at times. He liked to travel.

The people in the village here

said he was a very standoffish kind of man.

He wouldn't chat to you in the pub or anything like that.

-That's why he lived on an island.

-Yes.

They say no man is an island, but I gather Maxwell was.

-He had one of his own.

-He had one of his own.

Leaving Eilean Ban,

well, it seems that Maxwell had struggled to find happiness.

I cross the kyle to the island of Skye,

which has attracted waves of people since prehistoric times.

The story of human settlement on Skye goes back thousands of years.

The ancestors of the Gaels settled here.

The Vikings stayed for a while and intermarried with the locals.

That rounded mountain you can see over my shoulder brings

together both the Viking and the Gaelic heritage of the islands.

There's an enormous pile of stones, a cairn up on the summit

and it's said that a Viking princess was buried there.

Some say that this Viking was the toll-collecting Saucy Mary

herself, who in death wanted to be close to the winds

blowing from her Norwegian homeland.

Ever since, the mountain has been known as Beinn na Caillich.

The Hill of the Old Woman.

At least, that's what I have read in the journals

and accounts of some of the early visitors to the island,

who began turning up here towards the end of the 18th century.

But before that time, very few people outside the Highlands

and Islands knew much about Skye at all.

The Right Honourable Mrs Sarah Murray was one of the very

first outsiders to explore the island.

Travelling from London, she made several trips to the Hebrides

between 1799 and 1802.

Sarah Murray was an extraordinary woman.

She was an 18th-century lady from Chelsea who loved Scotland

with a passion, and nothing about the bad roads, bad food,

midges or indifferent weather, would dampen her enthusiasm

for the landscape and the people who made a great impression on her.

She described them as honest and brave, despite their poverty.

But Sarah Murray realised that she was witnessing the end of an era.

She came here at a time of great upheaval and change,

when poor tenants on Skye were forced to leave the land they loved.

In the 18th century, it wasn't usual for genteel ladies

to have opinions about things that mattered,

but Sarah Murray was an exceptional person.

She had witnessed for herself the melancholy departure of many

emigrants, as she described it, and was quick to apportion blame.

Greedy landlords screwing - and that's her word, not mine -

screwing their tenants for every last penny.

"In a very few years," she wrote, "the Hebrides will be deserted

"and the honest, brave race of West Highlanders

"and their language will be totally extinct."

Sarah Murray made that prediction long before the worst

of the evictions, known in folk memory as the Clearances,

emptied the island of whole communities.

70 years later, another woman also wrote

passionately about the cruel treatment of the people.

Unlike Sarah Murray, she was a native of Skye,

her name was Mary Macpherson, or Mairi Mhor.

Singer-songwriter Fiona Mackenzie

has a strong sense of connection to the woman who used song to

campaign with the Highland Land League for justice.

She was inspired by her people, by her language, by the countryside.

She had a big struggle.

She didn't start writing songs or poetry until she was in her 50s,

when she was living in Inverness.

She was falsely accused of stealing a scarf

and was then imprisoned in the Tollbooth in Inverness

and that was what inspired her to start writing.

Because of the injustice of not being able to make herself

understood in the courts.

She only spoke Gaelic, she had no English, and all the proceedings

in the court were in English, so she didn't know what was happening.

That was her transforming moment in her life,

in a sense, it turned her from an ordinary woman

to somebody who we'd say is politicised now.

Absolutely, absolutely.

From then on, she took up the mantle of somebody who could

speak for the ordinary man.

She felt a deep injustice that people around her weren't allowed to

work their own land, that they had been working for generations.

She discovered this ability to be able to put over

cases for people using her songs.

So she was adopted by all the Land Leaguers in the elections

and she'd get up and sing in front of audiences

and encourage people to support the Land Leaguers and incite people

to stand up for themselves and stand up for their language and country.

After years of struggle, the people of Skye,

buoyed up by the songs of Mairi Mhor,

won the right to make a decent living off the land of their ancestors

without the constant fear of eviction hanging over their heads.

The next stop on my grand tour is Raasay,

a long, narrow island stretching 40 miles from north to south.

In legend, it's known as the Island of the Big Men.

John Willie Gillies - a pretty tall man himself -

is a crofter who's lived here all his working life.

In Raasay itself, a lot of the local people,

they were brought up on crofts,

so the previous generation were brought up on crofts,

it's what they did. So if you go back in time,

everybody comes from crofting, one way or another.

We gather in the sheep now, we're shearing the hogs -

the ones - the ewe lambs - that were born and kept for stock from last year.

What happens to the fleeces?

Fleeces go in a bag and they go away to the Wool Marketing Board.

-And we get very little for them.

-THEY LAUGH

It's worse than last year. I think we get half what we got last year.

-How much are you getting a fleece?

-It's... I don't know.

We'll be getting one pound something a kilo, I think it is.

A kilo in weight of wool. Yeah.

Over the years, have you seen many changes in crofting?

The number of crofts that are actually being worked?

There's less people working crofts now. It's difficult.

People's expectations are higher.

And this is why people just don't do it any more.

There's easier ways of making money,

and there's ways of making lots more money too.

If you go back into history,

there was a great struggle back in the 19th century.

-Crofters retained the right to stay on the land.

-That's right, yeah.

And do people still feel that strongly?

Yes, people still feel that as well.

But that's what it was designed for.

When people got crofts, that's what they wanted it for -

a security and a place to live.

And you have a responsibility.

It doesn't matter what you've got -

it's like looking after your car, or whatever -

if you don't look after it, it falls to pieces.

Maintaining the health of crofting life has been a struggle,

especially on the islands.

Up until the Second World War,

there were several crofting communities

at the north end of Raasay.

Journalist Roger Hutchinson tells me how people began to leave

because the only road on the island stopped two miles short of their homes,

cutting them off from the 20th century.

110, 120 years ago, the motor car arrived in the Highlands of Scotland.

And the Inverness County Council had to start providing roads

for them to drive along.

And when they eventually got round to here on Raasay,

they built a road from the south end of the island

up to about a mile south of here,

at a place called Brochel.

So everybody in the south end of Raasay had access to new motor cars

which meant whenever they needed to see a doctor, somebody could appear,

everybody in the north end was left in the Middle Ages.

Repeated pleas to the council to build the vital road link

to these isolated communities were in vain.

But then, 40 years ago,

crofter Calum MacLeod decided to take things into his own hands.

His story has become the stuff of legend.

Working with a barrow, a pick axe and a shovel

for nearly 20 years, he built the road himself.

When he began to build the road

he'd have been about 56 years old.

He bought a book on the building and maintenance of motor roads

and Calum used that as a reference work,

and taught himself how to become a roads engineer.

In 1973, the BBC made a documentary film on Raasay.

In it, Calum McLeod makes an appearance, building his road.

Amazingly, the Herculean task of road building

was undertaken in Calum's spare time.

As well as being a full-time crofter,

he also worked as an assistant lighthouse keeper and a postman.

What made him do it?

Determination.

The insistence upon proving a point to the council,

after decades of denial on their part

that such a thing was possible.

And a love of community and place, I think.

Which is an extremely Gaelic sentiment.

Calum's dogged determination eventually paid off.

His road now linked the community of Arnish, where he lived,

to the rest of the island.

But it came at a cost.

The great irony, of course, is that by the time he'd finished,

there were just two people living up at the north end of the island -

himself and his wife, Lexie.

Well, that's not just ironic, it's tragic, isn't it?

Makes it a kind of magnificent Pyrrhic victory.

He'd done it, you know, and it's still here.

But, of course, it was too late.

The people had gone.

After a hike of nearly two miles,

we'd come to the end of Calum's Road,

and the house he lived in with his wife and daughter.

It's also the spot where Calum died.

His wife found him collapsed in his wheelbarrow after a heart attack.

He was 76 years old.

It was a terrible irony,

because previously,

whenever people from this end of the island died,

their remains, their coffin,

were taken by boat from Arnish Bay over there,

down the coast to the south end of Raasay to be buried in the cemetery.

Well, of course, they could get the hearse right up to Calum's door to collect him.

So he was the last man out of northern Raasay

down the road he had built with his own bare hands.

The whole story is fantastically symbolic, is it not?

Extraordinary.

Leaving Raasay, I reflect upon all other struggles faced by island communities.

As Roger told me, history often portrays the people as victims

living on the fringes of the modern world.

But Calum MacLeod was nobody's victim.

Through physical effort and willpower,

he had tried to give his community a future.

And if that took a road, then he'd build it.

Island people have always been self-reliant,

and when they weren't building roads,

they were busy creating landmarks of other kinds.

Stone walls, or dry stane dykes, as they are usually called,

are a common sight across Scotland.

On Skye, they are a silent testament to the crofters who built them.

Sadly, today, many are in a poor state of repair

because there are few people around

with the necessary skills to rebuild them.

Shona McLeod is an exception.

One of the few women in Scotland qualified for the job.

Joining her at the south end of Skye, I've come to watch her at work

rebuilding a traditional black house.

Shona says this is her dream job,

despite the inevitable midges.

In the old days, I suppose,

when people were building their own homes in a village,

would there be a particular dedicated stonemason?

Or how would it work?

Well, I think there would have been. I'm assuming there would have been.

But a lot of crofters had to do so many lengths of wall

for them to stay in their crofts, when they were doing the Clearances.

Because there was a lack of food.

So what they did was - instead of having to pay a percentage of what they had grown -

they had to build a certain length of wall.

I know they did that in Sutherland.

They used to have to bind their fingers in bandages,

because they didn't have any gloves then.

And what was the purpose of a lot of the walls that we see today

crossing the countryside, do you know?

Basically, just to keep the stock in,

but it's purely to give them something...to do.

I suppose if you're keeping the poor people occupied,

-there's less chance of rebellion.

-Yes!

And they'll be knackered after doing this all day!

To rebuild a wall, Shona often has to demolish it first.

This can provide an unusual glimpse into the past.

I always used to find these empty bottles in the wall.

What sort? Whisky bottles?

Whisky bottles. Aye. But it would only be in a certain...

You'd find a bottle and then you'd take about 10m down

and there'd be another load of them.

But what they did is, they'd have their Friday drink after the walling,

-and they'd pop the bottle in the wall.

-Is that right?

-Is that a tradition you maintain?

-No!

-That's a shame!

Leaving Shona to wrestle with the medium-sized boulders,

I head for the hills,

and the rocks that make up Skye's famous mountain range -

the Cuillin - where I have an appointment with a dramatic peak

called Am Basteir, which in Gaelic means The Executioner.

Scary stuff!

Unfortunately, on the morning of the climb, the weather breaks.

It's a long and wearisome trek

to get to the bottom of the imposing cliffs.

To keep me from putting a foot wrong in a dangerous place

is climbing guide Mike Lates.

I suppose people have been coming up here for a number of years.

This is a pretty well trodden route, this one.

Yeah, these hills have been explored since...

1836 was the first ascent on Sgurr nan Gillean up there in the mist.

But they were discovered quite late in mountaineering terms,

both in terms of Britain -

where rock climbing was going on in the Lake District already -

and it terms of world mountaineering,

there was a lot of alpinism going on already -

Mont Blanc had been having climbed

a good 60 years before Sgurr nan Gillean was discovered.

So were the Cuillins kind of overlooked in that case?

Yeah, they were just more difficult to access than the Alps themselves really.

Really? It was more difficult for climbers to come here than...

Yeah, until the Kyle railway was built.

When that came through across from Inverness,

it suddenly opened it up, and what the climbers discovered -

they were quite good alpinists already -

was that they'd got their own mini-Alps on their back doorstep.

And what they really liked was that they could have an alpine scale adventure

and still get back to the luxuries of the Sligachan Hotel in the evening.

-That's what I'm looking forward to!

-THEY BOTH LAUGH

These Victorian gents rated their Cuillin adventures

just as highly as their alpine ones.

Although the mountains here are all under 1,000m,

they can still challenge the most accomplished mountaineer.

Which is why Skye became a climber's mecca.

And it was in this Victorian heyday

that the first ascent of our route up Am Basteir was made.

It's one of the easier climbs,

but it still deserves respect -

especially on a day like today.

-This is no place to have a slip.

-Absolutely not.

No, no. We're about to get a view over into the back of the Cuillin

and you'll see.

A pretty similar drop on the other side of us.

All very forbidding, I have to say.

-OK.

-My life is in your hands.

-Enjoy!

THE GUIDE LAUGHS

The route follows the line of the narrow ridge,

when dramatic cliffs fall steeply on either side.

As the clouds lift, the view ahead is less than reassuring.

The crux of the route is called the Bad Step -

a five-metre cleft in the ridge -

which requires some delicate footwork to negotiate gracefully.

Right, that's going to go down...

Oh! Oh, that's a nice big hole.

'But finesse on rock is not my strong point,

'I'm just happy to get down in one piece.'

Whoo!

Whoo-hoo. I made it!

After the Bad Step, the ridge becomes alarmingly narrow.

And it's not easy keeping my balance as I gingerly wobble my way across.

Nice and steady, you can do it.

I don't know, I don't know.

Stand up, and one bold jump for mankind.

I'll try it.

-Woo-hoo!

-GUIDE LAUGHS

At long last,

after three hours of hair-raising, heart-stopping climbing,

I am more than relieved to reach the summit in time for lunch.

Wahey!

-Are we there yet?

-Yeah.

We are!

Congratulations, Paul.

Well, thanks. That's absolutely terrific.

Top of Am Basteir.

On top of The Executioner. A fantastic place to be.

As I chomp through my Scotch egg,

Mike tells me that we're perched on the lip of an ancient volcano.

We're sat on the rim of the magma chamber here.

The actual height of the crater

that you classically envisage with a circular volcano

would have been another three kilometres above us.

What blows me away is that it's all happened since the dinosaurs died out.

It went up to 15,000 feet, and has got worn down to this.

At that rate of erosion, there won't be much left of the Cuillin

in another 60 million years.

But that still leaves plenty of time to appreciate

these extraordinary mountains.

This is a fabulous, if slightly precarious place,

for me to end my grand tour of Skye -

with this stupendous view of the Cuillin mountains behind me,

and on the horizon, just appearing through the mist,

more islands for me to explore.

Fantastic.

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