Two-Way One-Lane Roads

I thought we’d seen winding, twisty roads before. But the road to Skye was nothing compared to this two-way road with only one lane, which snaked and coiled its way across the vast mountains. In order to allow cars to go two opposite directions in this one lane road, there were frequently placed “passing places” which were essentially small bits of shoulder which appeared here and there, sometimes barely the length of our car, to allow one of the cars to pull over and let another pass.

This system works fine and dandy in theory, and thankfully even in practice it worked for us. For the life of me, though, I don’t know how it did. The roads frequently and consistently wrap through and around mountains allowing only extremely limited visibility, and cars drive around many of these curves at such speeds that, while not high by beltway standards, are certainly not slow either. Courtesy procedure is to honk when going around one of these curves, theoretically letting anyone coming the opposite direction from around the corner know there’s someone coming the opposite direction in their lane. This system did not prevent a good number of very close encounters whereby everyone in the car collectively inhaled a sharp breath, but for all we know the horn honking may have prevented an actual accident from occurring.

Though I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, there have been infrequent sheep randomly walking on the side of the roads ever since we arrived in Skye. Here, the sheep and cow placement was upgraded to frequent. We had seen several sheep crossing signs before. I suppose there were too many sheep here for them to bother with, or perhaps instead the sheep were given the periodic Human Xing sign, because they truly seemed to think it was their road. Many was the time I thought we might actually ram a ram, but still it seemed that the bulls remained entirely uncowed. Wool the notion of hitting a sheep might not be enough to make one fold to sheer terror, it is definitely enough to make ewe think.

For the life of me, I had trouble thinking these were all domesticated sheep, because while I saw sheep everywhere, I saw no homes in these mountainous hills. There were an awful lot of sheep to be lost though, and I suspect some sheep dogs simply get lots of exercise running around the hills to round up their fold.

The view though… once again, the view was splendid. Yes, I know, Emerald mountains, blue mountain streams, yada yada yada,. I’ve written at length of the scenery already, but each viewing of it restored the sense of majesty, awe, and beauty anew.

Along the route, we came to Duntulm castle, or the ruins thereof. Castle is really kind of an overstatement. It was just a tad bigger than an outpost, which I suspect was its primary function, since it was overlooking the ocean by some pretty dramatic cliffs. It seemed like a place that, when the castle was fully built, would have been pleasant for about a day before the combination of harsh winds and a drafty quarters would have made it an unpleasant place to stay, despite the view.

We couldn’t stay long there, sadly, on account of not wanting to miss our boat. So I don’t remember it all that well. The cliff, so dramatic, I remember clearly. The ruins were pretty sparse though; no roof, and only bits of wall, and a small section still preserved dug into the ground. One bit of wall held up a window with a great view of the ocean and an island in the distance. It was a cool place, but for such a small and unpreserved set of ruins, it was pretty touristy, and there were crowds swarming in and around them. I had thought the MacLeod graveyard was far more interesting of a find, but that place didn’t even have a sign, let alone a swarm of tourists. Perhaps this place got such attention because it was so close to the Skye ferry.

We caught our boat fine and on time, though a few times this was in doubt. On our one lane road we came to a traffic jam, where a young lady on a bike had hurt herself somehow. The lady we gleamed this information from said that some had been waiting over an hour for the jam to clear, so it was fortunate that we weren’t stalled for more than 10 minutes. We also had the entertaining encounter of having a sheep fold charging down a hill at our car.