End of the world on the edge of Skye

Fiskavaig, Skye This huge island is a complication of landscapes, and on its west coast you walk the divide between them all

The lady had drawn a map to direct me to the beach: there it was, easy enough, but where a road continued off the edge she'd inscribed an arrow, and the words "end of the world". Curious, I follow the road off her map, past ancient rusting crofts on to a ribbon of singletrack, to where it stops. A knoll stands beyond a sheep gate and I climb it.

What I see from its knotty top is a place of transition. Beneath the knoll the land stops, falling to a sort of lagoon of strange, rumpled headlands and islands like pieces flayed off the land to drift. It seems this coast doesn't want to commit to the ocean: here the waters of Lochs Harport and Bracadale coalesce into a strange enclosure of the Minch. Beyond, only South Uist's taper offers harbour from the Atlantic's ferocious north water.