Isay
Isay is a small, uninhabited island off the northwest coast of the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Highlands, lying in Loch Dunvegan at approximately 57.51667, -6.65000. It is one of several tiny islands scattered across this sheltered sea loch, and though modest in size — roughly 30 hectares — it holds a quietly compelling place in Scottish history and in the imagination of those drawn to remote, windswept Atlantic landscapes. The island is largely flat and grassy, encircled by rocky shores, and it sits in plain view from Dunvegan on Skye's western coast. Its peaceful isolation belies a surprisingly rich backstory involving clan history, literary legend, and one of the more eccentric episodes in the life of the great Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson.
The most famous historical episode associated with Isay involves the MacLeods of Dunvegan, whose ancestral stronghold of Dunvegan Castle stands just a few miles to the east on the shores of the same loch. The island was once inhabited, with evidence of earlier settlement, and it formed part of the MacLeod domain for centuries. The clan chiefs held sway over these Hebridean waters, and the islands of Loch Dunvegan were bound up in the complex web of feudal loyalties, rents paid in cattle and kelp, and the slow depopulation that swept the Highlands and Islands through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The connection to Robert Louis Stevenson gives Isay a uniquely literary dimension. In 1869, when Stevenson was still a young man, he visited Skye with his father Thomas Stevenson, the celebrated lighthouse engineer. While sailing on Loch Dunvegan, the young Robert Louis became captivated by the island and is said to have persuaded his father to make inquiries about purchasing it. For a brief, romantic period, Stevenson nursed a dream of owning Isay and retreating there to write and live simply. He even wrote about it in correspondence, imagining it as a place of creative solitude. The plan came to nothing, but the episode reveals something essential about the island's hold on the imagination — its perfect smallness, its completeness as a little world apart.
In physical character, Isay is an island of low, wind-cropped grass and heather, with rocky outcrops and a shoreline of seaweed-draped boulders and pebble beaches. There are the remains of old stone structures on the island, echoes of the habitation that once made it a living community. The views from its modest heights are magnificent — across the grey and silver waters of Loch Dunvegan toward the Duirinish peninsula with its famous flat-topped hills, the MacLeod's Tables, looming to the south. Seabirds are abundant: gulls, eiders, oystercatchers picking along the tideline, and in season the chance of seeing great northern divers on the loch. The silence is broken mainly by wind and water.
The surrounding area of Loch Dunvegan and northwest Skye is among the most scenically dramatic in Britain. Dunvegan Castle, continuously inhabited by the MacLeod chiefs and one of Scotland's oldest inhabited castles, is open to visitors and provides rich historical context for the whole region. The nearby Coral Beaches — actually composed of maerl, a calcified seaweed — offer one of Skye's more unusual natural spectacles. The villages of Dunvegan and Colbost are close by, with a scattering of craft businesses, the Three Chimneys restaurant (one of Scotland's most celebrated), and the Colbost Croft Museum offering insight into traditional island life.
Visiting Isay requires a boat, as there is no ferry service or public access route to the island itself. The most practical approach is via kayak or small hired boat from Dunvegan, weather and tidal conditions permitting. The loch is generally sheltered but Hebridean weather is famously changeable, and any trip should be planned with caution and proper preparation. The island has no facilities whatsoever, and visitors should be entirely self-sufficient. Landing is possible on the rocky shores, but care should be taken not to disturb ground-nesting birds during the spring and summer breeding season. Autumn and early summer offer the best combination of reasonable weather and long daylight hours, with mid-summer providing the extraordinary luminosity of Hebridean evenings.
One particularly evocative detail about Isay is that it periodically comes up for sale, and its listings invariably spark a wave of romantic interest from people around the world who dream, as Stevenson once dreamed, of owning their own Hebridean island. It represents a persistent human fantasy — the small, self-contained retreat from the world — made tangible and buyable. That this fantasy attaches itself to a place with genuine historical depth, stunning natural beauty, and a direct literary lineage stretching back to one of the great storytellers of the English language makes Isay something rather more than just a pretty piece of uninhabited coastline.