Across the Sound of Raasay from Skye, 25 minutes by CalMac ferry from Sconser, Raasay runs about 14 miles from north to south. The boat lands near Raasay House, restored after a fire in 2009 and now a hotel and outdoor centre with a café and bar, and the Isle of Raasay Distillery, opened in 2017 as the island’s first legal distillery, runs tours. You can walk up Dùn Caan, the flat-topped summit at 443 metres, where James Boswell danced a reel in 1773. In the south-east, the township of Hallaig was cleared of its people in the 1850s; Sorley MacLean, born on Raasay, wrote his best-known poem about it, and a cairn on the path from Fearns has the words in Gaelic and English. In the north, Calum MacLeod built Calum’s Road himself between 1964 and 1974, a mile and three-quarters from Brochel Castle to Arnish, with little more than a pick, a shovel and a wheelbarrow, after years of failed campaigning for a road.
© Andrew Tryon / Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0
