Jurassic Isle of Skye

Skye’s been popular with visitors for ages – around 170 million years, in fact. Up on the Trotternish Peninsula, jutting into the sea is a nose of land known as Brothers' Point, or Rubha nam Brathairean, and it’s here that researchers have found dinosaur footprints dating back to the Middle Jurassic period. The headland’s ancient coastal mudflats hold evidence of around 50 different footprints, including those of a stegosaurus- type dinosaur and the three-toed imprints of meat-eating theropods. The whole landscape looked radically different back then, of course – and was, mind-blowingly, located in the southern hemisphere as part of supercontinent Pangea – but when people talk about Skye’s wildlife being something special, you can reflect on the fact that it’s always been this way. 

Indeed, if you call into the small but significant Staffin Dinosaur Museum, located in a stone-built former schoolhouse on the main road up Trotternish’s east coast, you’ll enter into a world of improbable palaeontological wonders. Established by local man Dugald Ross in the mid-1970s, when he was still a teenager, the museum holds an extraordinary range of finds, all discovered by Dugald himself. These include a cetiosaurus legbone, ichthyosaur jawbones, a trove of different ammonite fossils and a sparrow-sized dino footprint said to be the smallest in the world. 

It also holds far bulkier theropod footprints, as does nearby An Corran Beach, where you’ll routinely see people pacing up and down on the slabs, eyes down, looking for the telltale marks. If you double back on yourself after heading down the walkway onto the beach, you’ll find one close to the rocks. But regardless of whether you locate it – and the others hereabouts – it’s a fine place to be, with a winning view across to Staffin Island and the watery expanse of Staffin Bay.