Trotternish end to end, with somebody else driving
Portree, Staffin, Kilmaluag, Uig, Kilmuir
8 stops · 7:45 am – 9:30 pm · kept in May 202513 playbooks shared · added to 38 trips
- 7:45 am1Picked up in Portree, north on the A855Portree
A private driver-guide for the day is roughly the cost of the car divided by however many of you there are — split four ways it is comparable to hiring a car and cheaper than hiring one badly. What you are actually buying is the parking problem going away and somebody who knows which passing place to sit in. The one rule visitors break constantly on Skye: passing places are for passing, not for photographs, and a car parked in one on the Staffin road blocks the whole glen.
- 8:30 am2The Old Man of Storr before the car park goesPortree
Pay-and-display, and in June to August it is full by about nine — after that people park on the verge and get ticketed, because the roadside is now enforced along that whole stretch. The path is rebuilt and good underfoot, 2.3 miles return, an hour and a half at a stroll, but the last pull to the pinnacles is loose and the whole thing is inside cloud on roughly half the mornings of the year, which is why this is a hold rather than a plan. If the top is grey, the lower viewpoint still works and you have not wasted the morning.
- 10:45 am3Lealt Gorge and Kilt RockStaffin
Two roadside stops fifteen minutes apart, ten minutes each, free. Kilt Rock is the one on every postcard — a waterfall going straight off a basalt cliff into the sea. Stand at the fence for thirty seconds and listen: the railings hum in the wind, which is a genuinely strange noise and the thing people remember. Lealt, just south, has the better short walk and a quarter of the people.
3 min walk · 0 m - 11:35 am4The Quiraing, out and back to the TableStaffin
The road up from Staffin is single-track with a one-in-four climb and a car park that is a field — it is full by 09:30 in season and there is nowhere else. The full circuit gets described as a loop, but the high return leg above the landslip is badly eroded and has been partly closed more than once; the honest version is the level traverse out to the Prison and the Table and back the way you came, which is the good half anyway. Two hours, mostly flat, with one exposed slabby step that is unpleasant in the wet.
14 min by train or taxi · 14 km - 1:50 pm5Lunch at the top of the peninsulaKilmaluag
A tiny coffee-and-cake place in a shed at the far north end, open seasonally and closed on days the owners decide it is — check before you commit the drive. The Columba 1400 cafe in Staffin is the reliable fallback and does proper soup. There is nothing else between here and Uig, so eat when the chance appears rather than when you are hungry.
18 min by train or taxi · 11 km - 3:05 pm6The Fairy Glen above UigUig
Free, no ticket, a strange miniature landscape of grass cones about a mile up a side road from Uig. Two things worth knowing: do not build stone spirals, because the crofters and the ranger service clear them every week and the practice is stripping the soil; and this is not the Fairy Pools, which are in Glen Brittle forty miles the other way with a car park that is full by nine. Confusing the two is the most common wasted afternoon on Skye — the Pools are a different day, and one that starts early.
14 min by train or taxi · 8.7 km - 4:05 pm7Skye Museum of Island Life at KilmuirKilmuir
Seven thatched blackhouses kept as a croft township, run by the family whose township it was. Cheap, and the stop to drop if the Quiraing overran. Verified 2026-09-06: open Easter to late September only, Monday to Saturday 09:30–17:00, and closed every Sunday — not just out of high season — with the whole site shut from about the start of October until Easter. The window here has been pulled back to finish at 16:55 because the old 17:30 end ran past the door being locked. Flora MacDonald's grave is in the cemetery on the headland just above, five minutes on foot, and the view from it back down the Minch is the better half of the stop.
29 min by train or taxi · 29 km - 7:30 pm8Dinner at Scorrybreac, PortreePortree
About twenty covers in a room over the harbour, one sitting, set menu, and it books out weeks ahead in summer — reserve before you book anything else on Skye. If you miss it, Sea Breezes on the quay does the shellfish plainly and takes walk-ins earlier in the evening. Portree stops serving food remarkably early for a town this size; anything after 21:00 means a bar meal or nothing. Verified 2026-09-06: dinner is Tuesday to Saturday only (lunch Wednesday to Saturday), so a Sunday or Monday night in Portree needs a different plan entirely, and the restaurant closes for January and February. Book by phone; parties of five or more by email.