Friday 18 October 2024--Our guesthouse does not provide breakfast. We are going to Skye this morning, so we stop at Gasta, a café in Broadford. Then it's on along to Sligachan, where we turn off on the A863 and then the B8009. At Carbost, we stop for a quick photo of the Talisker Distillery.

Down the unnumbered and apparently unnamed road into Glen Brittle we go--the Glen Brittle Road, I suppose. I have in mind to visit the Fairy Pools, a series of small waterfalls and pools that lie along the Allt Coir' a' Mhadaidh and the Allt Coir' a' Tairneilear, tumbling out of cirques in the jagged Cuillin. I've heard about them probably ever since I've been visiting here, but have never seen them for myself. And I'm not going to today, either. For years, tourists would park at the side of the road as best they could, and hike on up the trail. There's a large pay-and-display parking lot now, which solves a lot of problems, I guess, not least the funding of trail maintenance. The public toilets are appreciated, I'm sure. But as the saying goes, if you build it, they will come. Even on a blustery October weekday, there are fifty or sixty cars here now. That's only about a third of the capacity of the lot, but it's enough to put me off. To be fair, we can see along up the hillside that the presumed crowd of visitors is well strung out along the trail, and it's probably far from crowded in any spot along the way. But I'm having a flashback to the various sites in Iceland that Win and I had pretty much to ourselves in October of 1999, and at which Marc and I found car parks with dozens of vehicles and even tour buses in October of 2017. I can taste the bile rising in the back of my throat. Maybe I'll do this another time, when I've gotten used to the idea. Not today.

We continue on down to the mouth of the glen, and spend some time on the beach. There are some gorgeous beaches in the Hebrides, but this, like others along this side of Skye, features dull gray sand and gravel. It is nevertheless a scenic spot.

Back up the glen we go, through Sligachan and Broadford, and then down the B851 toward the Sleat Peninsula. My alternate plan for today was to poke around this less-visited corner of Skye, which I've only ever circled around once, quite a long time ago. Too late for that today, but I want to have a look at Hotel Eilean Iarmain in the village of Isleornsay. I considered it for a night's stay, but it's beyond my budget. We look out from the jetty to Isle Ornsay itself, which can be visited on foot at low tide, and then stick our noses into Gallery An Talla Dearg, where we examine local art. Then to Bar Am Pràban, the hotel's public bar, for a pint. It's nowhere near as luxe as one might expect in a hotel with $300 rooms, with a family-friendly atmosphere that I suppose is aimed at the local community. It's nice enough; I could see passing an evening or two here. There's a reasonably-priced B&B a quarter mile up the road.

We have dinner this evening at the Plockton Inn. I looked at booking a room here; a few years ago, they offered an off-season three-nights-for-two deal that we took advantage of. There is no deal to be had under the new management, and prices are up, out of my comfort zone. They've made extensive renovations, and it has to be said that there is obvious improvement. It seems, however, that the soul of the place has been lost. The long menu, with its emphasis on local seafood, has been replaced by a shorter and more generic one. Ron tells me that last night's session was well attended, but seemed to lack the old vibe. A pint of Plockton Ale, which is brewed a hundred yards away, now costs an eye-watering £6.85 (which I imagine is the greater reason for the displacement of the Parliament). I sincerely hope that Kenny, the previous owner, is enjoying a well-deserved retirement somewhere warm and sunny, and also the ladies who ran the Kylesku Hotel, recently purchased by the same chain. But I'm not happy.

I have noted more than once in these journals that I am not the world's most sociable person, and I sometimes characterize myself as being more interested in places than in people. But it's people who make a place, isn't it? At least that's so of a place like Plockton, for many years my favorite stop in Scotland. When Teresa sold the B&B in 2018, I felt at a bit of a loss, and decided to skip Plockton that year. Ron and I stayed at the Inn in 2019...and now, quite suddenly, it seems, I find I have been five years away, thanks largely to Covid. I dropped Teresa's name to the folks at our guesthouse, as a reference, when I was booking, and was told that she had passed away--in July of 2021, in a care home in Broadford (where her step-daughter lives), "after a long illness," according to an online obit. Maybe it was a diagnosis that led her to sell the house. Whatever the case, it's a gut-punch. And now the Plockton Inn feels less like a long-time member of the community, and more like the incomer who hasn't figured out yet how to fit in, and isn't quite trusted.

So now I find myself walking along Harbour Street, feeling the evening chill, smelling the familiar mix of salt air and peat smoke, wondering whether Plockton still means something to me. "Scotland's greatly altered now," I hear Jim Malcolm singing. It's like meeting a friend not seen in years, and finding out you're not quite on the same wavelength anymore. I feel old.