So, despite the Isle of Skye usually being covered in rain and mist and whatnot, it was about 80 degrees and sunny today and our guide Sandy was loving it! Not to say the rest of us didn’t enjoy the weather, who else can say they got a tan in Scotland?
Our day started early and we drove down the east coast, stopping at a small river for a story: In order to stop the feuding between two clans it was decided that they would marry one clan chief’s son to the most beautiful girl in the other clan. The two fell quickly in love and wanted to get married. On the way to the wedding the bride was thrown from her donkey and cut her face on the rocks. She was distraught and didn’t know what to do but her handmaiden told her to just cover her face with a veil and get through the wedding and everything would be alright. The bride didn’t like the idea and wanted to be honest with her soon to be husband but she went along with the plan. So at the wedding the bride hid her now disfigured face with the veil but when it came time to reveal herself the man was horrified and thought he was being tricked and he attacked the girl. She ran crying to this river and heard a voice (Sandy was great with the voices for stories but you’ll just have to imagine it). It was King Elvin, the Fairie King. Fairies love stories and so he asked the girl to tell him what was wrong and so she did and he told her that as thanks for telling him a story she could put her face in the river for seven seconds and everything would be alright. Now the husband felt terrible about what had happened at the wedding and he went searching for his bride and when he finally saw her she was putting her face into the river and he ran to her, thinking she meant to hurt herself. When he pulled her from the water she was as beautiful as always and she explained that she never meant to deceive him. And they lived happily ever after. And that’s how you get a bunch of tourists to stick their faces into a river! It was very clear water, you could even drink it and while I didn’t do either of those things, I did enjoy the story.
After that we continued on and learned a bit about the Monroes in Scotland, which are the mountains above a certain height. For lunch we stopped at Dunvegan castle, a castle that even today is still lived in, which meant to pictures inside. However, there were some beautiful gardens on the grounds filled with flowers.
For the afternoon we continued up and around Skye visiting a few ruins and coastlines and even the Old Man of Stor, as seen in the BFG and therefore overly crowded for a rock.