The Silent Season

A winter journey through the Isle of Skye

Words and images: Skye O’Neill

For years I had wanted to visit Skye, the largest island of the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland; I was named after it, although my Australian parents never visited it, either before I was born or afterwards. Perhaps this just shows the almost mystical hold that this small outcropping of rock on the edge of the Atlantic has over the imagination. I almost made it there when I (somewhat misguidedly) joined a backpackers’ bus tour around the Highlands with my sister in our early twenties—we got as far as Kyle of Lochalsh on the other side of the bridge that was built in the early 1990s to connect Skye with the mainland. I remember reading about the bridge in an old National Geographic and somehow I expected it to be miles long, like the Forth bridge that crosses the Firth of Forth west of Edinburgh. In fact, Skye lies tantalisingly close to the mainland, so much so that I couldn’t help but wonder why they hadn’t built a bridge sooner.

In The Skye Boat Song, which I learnt as a child at school in Sydney (looking back, this seems almost quaintly colonial), Flora Macdonald famously rows Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Jacobite heir to the British throne, “over the sea to Skye” disguised as an Irish maid to escape the British soldiers. The sea referred to in the song is not the short stretch between the mainland and Skye, however, but the Minch, which separates Skye from the Outer Hebrides, where Bonnie Prince Charlie had been hiding in caves and abandoned bothies for months following the disastrous battle of Culloden in 1746. Eventually he escaped from Skye back to France on a French naval ship, never to return.