Waternish – Coffee and Cake at a Farm and a Sheepskin Tannery
A few hours.
The route
Waternish is crofting country in the north-west of Skye, and where its road meets the road to Stein, a farm and a tannery sit either side of the junction.
Waternish Farm is run for corncrakes and wild flowers as well as its cattle, and serves coffee and cake in its farmhouse. Close by, Skyeskyns turns sheepskins into rugs and throws.
Before you go
Book accommodation nearby
If you are staying over: here are ours nearest where the day starts and ends.
Book the 10am coffee and cake at Waternish Farm ahead on 01470 592793 or at info@waternishfarm.com: it takes visitors on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, all year.
The day
Waternish
A slow start with coffee and cake in a farmhouse tea room looking over the sea, then a tour of a working tannery and a browse among the sheepskins in the loft showroom above it.
About two hours
Waternish Farm
Coffee and cake
Park by the old waterwheel and the stone arch at the end of the farm's drive. The morning visit is coffee and cake at 10am in the farmhouse tea room, which looks out over the sea towards North Uist, and nobody else is booked in with you. Add the talk on how the farm is managed for wildlife: its black Lowline Angus cattle, the wild flowers, and the corncrakes that call from the long grass from late April into August. It's £10 a head, or £15 with the talk, and half price for children from five to fourteen.
Skyeskyns
A shop
Skyeskyns is three minutes' drive away, across the junction. A family business on the croft where it began in the 1980s, it calls itself the only commercial sheepskin tannery left in Scotland, and it still works with vintage machinery from the 1920s and 30s. Tours are free and run through the day: ask when you arrive, or follow the audio tour on your phone. Upstairs, the showroom is a long loft under skylights, its rails hung with rugs and skins, with coffee in a corner of it in winter. There's level access to the tannery; the showroom is up a flight of stairs, and the staff will bring fleeces down.
If it rains
The farmhouse tea room and the tannery are both under a roof, so a wet morning suits this as well as a dry one.
The Stein Inn Bar, one of the oldest inns on Skye, on Loch Bay.
Make it a weekend
More days out on the Isle of Skye.
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