Locomotoring

The last visitor’s summary on AllTrails for Lookout Bothy – Rubha Hunish said “super muddy but impeccable views”. Rubha Hunish is a 3.4 mile trail on the northermost tip of Trotternish peninsula (link). On a clear day, one can see the Isle of Lewis across the ocean.

If I were to create a word cloud from the AllTrails reviews of Skye trails, following terms will dominate – “view”, “slippery”, “muddy”, “rocky”, “scramble”, “windy”, “rain”, and “fog”. They don’t distinguish one trail from another. So you have to rely on some other marker. In this case, we relied on our BnB, Woodbine Guest House, owner, Steve. He loved Quirang first and Rubha Hunish next. We did both on the same day since neither on its own was a particularly long trail.

The Rubha Hunish was an evening walk. The days are so very long in Scottish summer that it might well have been afternoon. Our only deadline was a dinner reservation at 7. Scottish Highland hospitality industry recommends dinner reservations. There are not enough restaurants to feed all the tourists who land there. We reached the bothy, the coastguard lookout, in good time. The views were indeed impeccable. And no, we didn’t go down the cliff – I would need to be a goat to do that.

What happened next was simply incredible. At least it was incredible for me. We ran into a short stretch of boggy land. Because we had taken our Californian weather with us, it wasn’t impossibly muddy that day. What it was instead was a soft ground, you had to move quickly before your feet sank. The trail had disappeared into the boggy grassland, so one had to try a few directions before picking one. Sometimes retracing and starting over became necessary. That jiggy-jaggy near random walk on the bog made return to the trailhead interesting, particularly given that we were targeting a 7 pm dinner. I might have freaked out if we hadn’t especially noted an octogenarian who had crossed this route a little ahead of us. We knew we would make it, whether we would get dinner or not was the only unknown. It turned out that we made dinner time.

Btw, Rubha is Gaelic for “headland” and Hunish is Norse (link) and means “headland of the bear cub” reflecting its shape. It illustrates the Skye’s Norse and Gaelic heritage.

I had gone to Scotland for the crag, the bog and the fog. Between the Quirang and the Lookout Bothy, we experienced the first two. Fog would elude us this trip.