Hello, and welcome back to your annual story time of Ben and Sarah’s international adventures! Keeping with the tradition of the last few years, Sarah and I visited with her family, this year going back to Scotland.

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Sunday, 29-Dec-2019

 

On the isle of Skye, we stayed in the town of Portree.  It’s a gorgeous town, sort of windswept, but also very ocean-focused… It was sort of like Cape Cod to me, but not completely; there was a vague resemblance, sort of like a distant cousin.

The first evening we were on Skye, we went to an amazing restaurant called ScorryBreac – and had an unbelievably delicious multi-course meal, along with amazing evening views of Portree harbor.  I can’t quite remember if we walked from the house, or if we drove, but either way I do remember the evening being lovely, if a bit misty, and an excellent introduction to Skye!

An interesting quick trivia fact, the name of “Portree” has a pretty interesting history – Portree has two possible etymologies, from what we learned.  One, is the english phonetic of the Gaelic word “Port Righ”, or “Port Royal”, named after a time that King James visited the town.  The other option is “Port Ruighe”, which describes the landscape as “Slope Harbor”… either way is pretty interesting, and definition a cool trivia fact.

 

We had the chance to explore Portree pretty frequently, and got to know the town as the days rolled by.  Sarah and I had the chance to explore two areas on our own – “The Lovely Muck” and “The Lump”.  Folks on Skye just have an amazing way with words, don’t they?

The Muck is an area by the harbor, almost a tidal flood plain, where we found a few firepits and lots of in-work fishing ships.

The Lump is a peninsula jutting out into the harbor, topped off by an old apothicary’s tower and the site for Portree’s highland games!  Very beautiful, and an amazing place to see the whole town and gaze off over the water…

 

One other interesting feature of Portree – the Isles Inn.  We ended up using this Inn as something like our main base, since it was open later than most other places, and had an amazing slew of lunch options.  We all got to know the Cullen Skink specifically – “Skink” is a type of Scottish soup, very similar to Chowder, and “Cullen” is the town where the soup itself is from.  It’s really similar to clam chowder, but with smoked haddock instead of clams, and The Isles chef was an artist at making it.

Past that, Portree was simply a lovely town – small, quiet, and a beautiful place to relax and enjoy Skye!