One popular spot to visit on Skye is the Fairy Pools. This area has a trail that follows a river, the River Brittle, which flows down a hillside with many waterfalls along the path. I was advised that this place could get very busy and that the best time to visit would be the early morning. So, I started out early one morning and drove in the rain down the windy, bumpy single-lane road out to the carpark at the trailhead. There is a large carpark that was mostly empty when I got there. You must pay for an all-day pass to park for some reason. It was a rainy morning, but it mostly stopped by the time I started hiking. Below is a phone-photo from looking down the path near the trailhead also showing the heavy cloud-cover.

My first stop was at a waterfall by the foot bridge. There were flowers nearby so I trudged through the mud to set up for a few photos. You can’t be too worried about keeping your shoes clean out here or you won’t get to see anything. I think it might work better with out the muddy path in the foreground.

The next one is probably my favorite. There were dark low-lying clouds among the hills that made for some gloomy drama. It may have been a little better had I waded out in the river to get closer to the waterfall. I think I worried too much about having dry feet out here and should have just brought along a spare pair of socks and risked wet feet to get a good shot or two.

After hiking out here for a few hours, I returned to the now full car park and headed down the road to a coffee shop / cafe I saw and had a nice breakfast. And then, just up the road a bit is the Sligachan Old Bridge, which doesn’t involve much hiking. The Sligachan Old Bridge is quite the tourist attraction and there were dozens of people there enjoying the bridge.

I’m not sure how much editing makes a photo no longer a true photo, but more of a processed image. I didn’t want all of the people in my photos, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that on the scene, so I went into Photoshop and digitally erased all of the people. I find the people distracting to an image like this as I think the viewer’s eye is drawn toward people in an image. I think that we are probably evolved to recognize humans in a scene and immediately focus our attention there. I wanted the scene with bridge and the mountains to stand out. Anyway, I’ll put both images here so you can decide if I was too heavy-handed with my edit.

This bridge passes over the River Sligachan and I noticed many people going down to the bank, getting down on their hands and knees and drinking from the river. Maybe the river water is nice and cool and seems fresh to drink, but looking at this I considered how all of these rivers form here. Most days there is light rain falling across the hillsides… the hillsides dotted with countless sheep everywhere you look… the hillsides dotted with countless sheep and what they leave behind. Anyway, all of that gentle rain falls on the hillside, runs down to form rivulets that combine into streams and eventually rivers, like the River Sligachan that you see in the photo below. I think putting that unfiltered river water in your stomach is probably a baa-ad idea.

I walked around this muddy area a bit, enjoying the clouds and drinking bottled water. Later that day, I hiked to an old deteriorating church that had many graves for clan members from long ago. I went to the Tallisker distillery and had a drink as it seemed like something to do. Eventually I ended up at Neist Point which I already wrote about last time – I felt like writing about it first.

Thanks for reading.