Hiking Isle of Sky: Fairy Glen

We spent two nights on Isle of Skye in Scotland. While there, we hiked in some beautiful places including the Fairy Glens. Because we took so many pictures during these days, I plan to break up the posts for each of the bigger hikes. This week, I’ll cover our hotel and our first hiking experience!

Driving onto Isle of Skye:

Ferry Terminal to Uig

As I left off last week, we exited the ferry terminal and drove to our hotel which took almost an hour and a half. The drive was gorgeous.

Driving on Isle of Skye

Evan did not stop for photo ops, so all pictures were taken out of the moving vehicle. This did not capture the beautiful color of the water well.

Booking a Hotel on Isle of Skye:

Booking a hotel on Isle of Skye was the hardest out of any place we visited. Hotels and B&Bs book quickly here, so I recommend booking a place to stay well in advance! Finding nights in a hotel also helped to determine which nights we would spend on Skye. To find the hotel, we searched the Expedia site for all available hotels in our price range (cheap!).  Then, we read as many reviews as we could find for hotels with 2 rooms available. Reading review sites, I thought we wanted a place closer into town to be near restaurants and grocery stores. However, we were still able to visit Portree one day for lunch.

Our Hotel:

We booked the Uig Hotel, and I couldn’t recommend it more. This hotel consists of the main hotel building and the lodge behind it. They have a bar and a restaurant and ample parking. They are located just down the hill from the fairy glens, and everyone we encountered during our stay was so kind. We stayed in the inn just behind the main building. There was a picnic table outside of our rooms that we utilized more than once. This hotel is further away from the ferry terminal and the main towns, but it is a much closer drive to all of the famous hikes!

The front of the Uig Hotel

Our rooms

View from our room

Hiking on Isle of Skye

I think Isle of Skye is quintessential Scotland. There are so many hikes to do, it was hard to choose which ones we wanted to try and fit in during our time there. We spent two nights on Skye, but the first afternoon was driving to the hotel. The only full day, we spent hiking. The second morning we were there, we packed up and left after breakfast. I tried to do as much research as I could ahead of time. I read so many guide books, but one of the best references was Pinterest. (Click here for a link to my Scotland Board.) The blogs I found were invaluable, as many people posted amazing recaps with advice and great pictures to places the guide books never mentioned!

Advice:

I already planned an outline of what I hoped we could accomplish in one day, but I left it open ended. The first night on Skye, I used the hotel wifi to look back at some of the blog posts I found in order to write down directions to each place we wanted to visit. Some of the roads on our route were single track dirt roads, but we managed to find almost everything on the list!

The Fairy Glens

The Fairy Glens were mentioned in many of the articles/blogs I read. Luckily, this was located less than 2 miles from our hotel. The Fairy Glens were a great first stop, as we had the area to ourselves. We just found a nice pulloff on the side of the road, stopped the car and got out to walk around.

Fairy Glens

Love for Walter

Continuing our Tour:

After spending some time at the Fairy Glens, we continued our road trip around Isle of Skye. Because the other hikes are very picture heavy, I think I will split them up into separate posts. Stay tuned for our next stops, two of which were unplanned but amazing!

Click back here for a full recap of our itinerary with links to all of the previous days. Hopefully, when I make it through our entire trip, I can add links to each post for yesterday and tomorrow. 🙂

~Ali~

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