The Isle of Skye is the largest of the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, and its northern spine is a thirty-kilometre wall of leaning rock pinnacles you can walk in among. The best of it is the Quiraing, a maze of towers, rock walls and hidden green terraces with names to match: the Prison, the Needle, the Table. The loop through it climbs and traverses the slopes of Britain's biggest landslide, with the sea and the mainland hills spread out far below. Further along the same ridge, the path to the Old Man of Storr is usually walked in the dark. You arrive as the first light spreads across the pinnacles, and the towers throw long shadows while the whole Trotternish coast turns gold under you. The coast road round the peninsula keeps handing it back: sea cliffs dropping into the water, and at Kilt Rock a waterfall going straight off the edge into the sea. Every layby opens another view across the Sound of Raasay to the mainland mountains.
The Black Cuillin, in the south, is a different island altogether. Skye's moorland is soft and green, and then the paths climb into bare dark rock under a jagged skyline, and the scale closes in as you go. These are the most serious mountains in Britain. Even a short way up one of the corries the difference is obvious: steep, stark and unmistakably volcanic. At their foot the Fairy Pools step down Glen Brittle in clear blue basins and short falls. Swimmers work their way from one to the next, ducking under the little cascades and through narrow chutes the water has worn smooth. The rock up above is gabbro, coarse enough to grip your boots like sandpaper and packed with so much magnetic mineral that a compass needle swings, wanders or spins uselessly along the ridge. On a mountain in cloud that is the one instrument you would want.