The Tote Stone

The next day was to be a day of travel. We aimed to leave Skye and make our way to the Hebrides, and our boat was scheduled to leave at 2pm. Our boat was a good distance away from where we were, so we resolved to keep our site seeing stops close to our route for the day. Sadly, we couldn’t find most of the sites we were looking for. Most everything we’d seen in Scotland is utterly unmarked for or by tourists. We’ve rarely seen any other tourists, and we have tended to consider ourselves pretty lucky if we happen to see a sign to direct us to what we’re looking for. I really like that, to be able to see these sites and ruins that don’t seem particularly marked as tourist attractions, but that they are simply a part of the land. However, the downside of this is that you basically have to spot what you’re looking for, likely as not to be a good distance from a road and surrounded by grazing sheep in some farmer’s back yard.

At any rate, we only found one site we were looking for, the Tote stone, so named because it was a standing stone in Tote. As standing stones go, it was rather unremarkable, standing about half my height, surrounded closely by a wooden fence that formed a tight box around it. It did, however, have some ornate, though very faded, Celtic circles carves across it, assumably done by whomever took it upon themselves to put the stone there thousands of years ago. I believe this stone is thought to have been done by the Picts, and is the only standing stone I saw with any sort of ancient engravings.

On our way driving to our boat, we lucked out when we happened to find what looked to be the ruins of an old outpost turret guarding the water. However there was a sign on the gate reading “private property: Keep off!” and on the door of the tower we could read (using our binoculars) a sign reading “danger”. Thus we assumed it was deemed unsafe for visitors.

We picked up our tickets to the boat trip, but our lack of scenic distraction led us there a good hour or so early. So we set off on a scenic trop recommended to us by the boat’s ticket man.