Trottenish Ridge - Isle of Skye

Glorious views along the Trotternish Ridge

The walk we did the second day on the Isle of Skye has to be one of the best day walks I have ever done. It has everything you want in a great walk; distance, views, remoteness, variety, difficulty, navigation. It's going to be tough to get close to this walk anywhere else. If you have a chance to do it, take it, you will not regret it. It's 34kms long though, so be prepared, with I think 1800m cumulative ascent during the day, so it's going to be long and tough. But I think it's more than worth it.

Those skies and that ridge!

It was a fairly early start, I think we were walking by 8:30am, and that was after having caught a bus to the starting point. We started out in total fog. You couldn't see more than about 50m in front of you. It was a bit of a shame, since you start at the Old Man of Storr which is this collection of weird rock formations that we just couldn't see at all. The walk was meant to include an ascent up The Storr, which at a mighty 719m elevation is the highest point of the day. The fog was so bad though it was hard to find the route up. You would think it would be obvious to find the highest point, but it was a ridge walk, so The Storr is just one point of many along the ridge.

Finally able to see the route ahead

The fog slowly starting to lift

The first 2 hours were a bit tricky navigation wise, just because we couldn't see any features. There is no path once you are past the Old Man of Storr. Since you are trying to get up onto this ridge, there are not many places you can get up from the front. You are faced with cliffs and you want to get onto the top of these cliffs. On the other side the ridge slopes down quite gently, but you can't get onto that side without first going up the cliff. So we sort of had to walk round the back somehow, which meant finding a break in the cliffs to get up and around. It was a bit tricky to find it in the fog.

We did eventually find our way up, we knew once we hit the ridge we would be right for navigation for the rest of the day. It was a little freaky coming upon the edge of the ridge, as it just drops away from you, hundreds of metres, but you can't see that until you are right on top of it, thanks to the fog. You would peer off the edge and there would be this really strong up draft coming up at you and just rocks down to the bottom. Apparently this 30km long ridge was formed from a massive landslip, must have been something to see when it occurred. I was hoping that the fog would lift at some point, it would have been a very depressing day if it was that foggy for the whole way.

Starting to see hints of blue sky, with the great rock formations.

The fog starting to lift, with glimpses of the cliffs beyond

Thankfully it did eventually lift, around lunchtime. We had followed the ridge out to the hill of the red fox, I'm not sure why it was called that. It's this little outcrop that you reach along a very narrow slip of rocks. That was the most freaky bit, it was basically a foot wide, there was one very obvious place to put your feet. It wasn't very long, maybe 10m, and then it opened up to a small platform where we could sit and have a snack. To get there it felt like the ridge should continue on some way, but it was hard to see where it would go. At that point the fog started to lift every now and again, and we could tell we were actually on this little spit of an outcrop, and really the ridge continued on the other way. So we had to cross back the narrow promontory to continue on.

The undulations we had to contend with

Now this is why I came to Skye 

Once the fog had finally dispersed the sun really came out in full-force. We actually ended up getting a bit sun burnt, because given the conditions in the morning no one had bothered with suncream.

One of the other great things about this walk was the lack of people. I've never been on a walk with such a high awesome views to people ratio. We saw maybe 5 other people during the entire 34kms, 3 of which were all together and heading the other way, and the other 2 were just spotted in the distance walking somewhere else. There was nobody around for almost the entire 12 hours we were out there. Once we got towards the end there were more people, but on the ridge itself, nobody. I would come back to Skye purely for that solitude. Seriously, if anyone wants to do this walk, I would be there in a flash, definitely the best walk I have done in a long time.

Just great views everywhere you look

Does it get any better?

It did take us 12 hours to do the distance, I think the navigational issues in the first half of the day, along with the lack of path, really slowed us down. Plus the copious photo taking didn't really help, but how could I resist.

The end of the walk is through the Quiraing, which is very similar to the Old Man of Storr. So the walk had a nice feeling of closure, as if you were back at the beginning. It was this whole section of just freaky rock formations that you walked through. Unfortunately the light was no good by this stage, so the photos didn't really come out. I guess I'll just have to visit again in different conditions. The conditions on the ridge couldn't have been better, so I'll leave you with a few more.

It's like another world up in Skye

One last shot