Friday Another day, another distillery

What to do today. I know let's go to a distillery! 

Torabaigh distillery is both new (2017) and owned by a small independent Mossburn distillers. We'd tasted its Allt Gleann expression which we liked but I wanted to buy a bottle of their latest offering Cnoc Na Moine which has benefited from two years in sherry casks which should, of course, have a little added fruity sweetness. 

Talking of casks

We decided against the distillery tour because we wanted to tour the island. Sadly not enough time to do everything I really would liked to have taken the short ferry ride over to Raasay (£4.60 return for foot passengers) to visit, yes you've got it, the Raasay Distillery! Still I'm sure we'll find a bottle somewhere.

Before leaving Torabhaig here's a random snap from the distillery

We head back and down around the Cullin mountains towards Elgol, there's supposed to be some nice waterfalls near Torrin but we couldn't find the track. Note to self, next time buy a guide book! Anyway we decided that driving for its own same was futile so just after Torrin we retraced our tracks.

Oh, you were expecting a picture of the Cullins?

Next port of call, the island's largest town Portree. Now we are expecting the place to be full of tourist tat but hoping there's some interesting local shops like a butchers. Well, we got that 50% right, tourist tat everywhere (OK, that's not fair, some of it is nice tourist craft stuff) but a lack of local shops, no butcher, no baker, even one of the two charity shops was shut. The Co-op was small, although they did have some reduced Scotch Pies which will do nicely for tonight's meal.

The highlight for me was this curio

So off to find the campsite, the one we had booked as opposed to last night's chance-it. Driving out of Portree we did spot a larger Co-op though which might be handy for tonight. 

The campsite is OK and we can walk along the loch to the beach but tonight's mission is the Edinbane Inn just over a mile away. And despite it being rural we are amazed to find a footpath all the way. We were also amazed by these two seranaders we met en route

Pub was fine, no handpumps but they did have an excellent pint of Cromarty Ghost Town porter, so good I had a second! 

Missed the best of the sunset

But the van's down there somewhere

Right, trying a new logger today, this should show our peregrinations in a bit more detail

That's 86 miles today. We are just about 50 miles short of the 1,000 for the trip