Beacon

We arrived too close to sunset to risk the walk down to the lighthouse, so I never took it. This is the nearest I have ever been to that building. The car park was a muddy scrape that clearly hadn’t been built for the number of people turning up, and a lot of them had come out for what looked like a promising evening.

What saves the place is the cliff above it, which is broad and stepped and has ledges and boulders enough for everybody. People spread themselves along the shelf and nobody was in anyone else’s way. The wind, though, was ferocious — I spent most of the evening tucked in against a boulder using it as a shield.

Half an hour before sunset the cloud closed over and took the whole thing, and although we stayed on in hope and got a sprinkle of rain for our trouble, no miracle arrived. I’m glad I worked through golden hour instead of saving myself for a sunset that never came. The part I like best is the way the headland splits the light almost exactly in half: warm on one side of the outcrop, cool on the other.

There’s something about the shape of that headland that doesn’t look real. Cropped green grass, cliffs dropping straight off, sheep scattered across the top and a single piece of architecture set right on the end of it — the combination is so improbable that stepping into it feels like stepping into a fantasy novel.

That morning I’d photographed the Quiraing at sunrise, and this was the same day. It was my birthday, and I got two of the best locations on Skye inside one of them.