8-day Scotland travel tour: Highlands, Skye & Outer Hebrides

The first part of your tour is by first-class train from Edinburgh to Inverness. It’s a gentle introduction to the Scottish Highlands, with views of lochs, mountains and moors. After a mid-morning departure, you will arrive in Inverness in the afternoon, transferring to your accommodation via taxi.

You’ll receive a warm Scottish welcome at Coul House Hotel, an historic, family-run Georgian mansion. Get settled in, admire the countryside views and garden, and raise a glass to the start of your vacation in Scotland.

• Hotel: Coul House Hotel, Strathpeffer
• Group dinner

On the way to Skye, we’ll stop at a quintessentially Scottish landmark – Eilean Donan Castle.

Standing where three lochs meet, the castle’s fascinating history began long before BBC branding and James Bond films made it famous! You’ll have plenty of time to wander the battlements and the castle halls and take lunch, before we hit the road and cross the bridge to Skye.

Travelling back down to Portree, we’ll end this day by checking into your accommodation on Skye, the four-star Cuillin Hills. This award-winning hotel has an equally commended restaurant, inviting bedrooms and some of the most remarkable loch and mountain views on Skye.

• Hotel: Cuillin Hills Hotel, Portree for the next two nights
• Group dinner
• Daily Walking Details: Approx. 2 miles | Negligible ascent | Approx. 2 hours

After breakfast with an unforgettable view of the Cuillin Hills, you’ll embark on a real Skye vacation adventure. We’ll head to a loch that’s notoriously hard to reach – if you travel there by land…Luckily, you’ll be travelling by water! Board a boat in the village of Elgol to reach the elusive loch Elgol, which has stories of its own, having hosted Bonnie Prince Charlie while he evaded government capture after the Battle of Culloden.

At the picturesque Loch Coruisk, you’ll find out about the area’s geological past and hear the story of the Highland Clearances, a key chapter in Scottish history. Afterwards, there will be a picnic lunch and time to take a short or an optional longer walk along the shoreline of this hidden gem.

After getting the boat back to Elgol, we’ll return to Portree for a free afternoon and a last dinner at the Cuillin Hills Hotel.

• Hotel: Cuillin Hills Hotel, Portree
• Group dinner
• Daily Walking Details:  Approx. 1.8 mile | 165ft ascent | 1.5 hours

After a last breakfast on Skye, it’s time to head off on the next leg of your Scotland vacation to the Isle of Harris. First though, we’ll travel to its northern Trotternish Peninsula, and stop off at the Old Man of Storr, an iconic collection of rock pinnacles that is an internationally recognisable sign of the island. Then around the north of Skye and further sights, including the spectacular Quiraing mountain landscapes and cliffs, that owe their origin to ancient volcanic activity.

We take a ferry from Uig, on Skye’s north-western coast, to the town of Tarbert on the Isle of Harris.

On the way up from the ferry to the hotel in Stornoway, we’ll visit Luskentyre beach and go on a short walk over the sands to see the ‘runrigs’ and The Coffin Road – Hebridean Way

The oldest rocks on Harris and Lewis, known as the Lewisian, are named after the Isle, and were formed over 3000 million years ago. They are two-thirds as old as the Earth itself! Some of the rocks are similar to rocks found in the mountains of the moon.

We will travel to Stornoway, the main town on the Isle of Lewis.

• Hotel: The Royal Hotel, Stornoway
• Group dinner

Today we visit and a walk around the extraordinary Calanais Standing Stones. The stones were erected 5,000 years ago, that is even before Stonehenge!. Made of Lewisian gneiss the intriguing deep time story of the Lewisian rocks and their journey from depths of up to 60km, from below the continental crust, back to the surface a billion years ago, to then be placed in Neolithic Circle. We’ll also visit the Carloway Broch, which is one of the best preserved in the Hebrides and dates back over 2000 years.

Hear stories of Norse invaders and the discovery of the famous 12th century, Lewis Chessman found in 1831 and carved from walrus Ivory. Parts of the set are now in the British Museum and parts in the National Museum of Scotland.

In the afternoon we leave the outer Isles and travel back across the Minches to Ullapool. Approaching the mainland again we pass the Summer Isles with their colonies of seabirds and seals and take in the view of the majestic mountains that define the west coast of Scotland. We will hear about a geological history that involves continental collision and is home to the early theories of mountain building. These theories created some of the most intense Victorian scientific controversies.

• Hotel: The Ceilidh Place, Ullapool
• Group dinner

Today the tour takes in some of the most spectacular parts of the scenic route of the North Coast 500 and spends much of its time in the NW Highlands UNESCO Geopark.

The themes straddle one of the most contentious debates of Victorian Earth Sciences at the dawn of tectonic geology. The Highlands Controversy pitted the amateur and academic geologists against the Victorian scientific establishment. We’ll visit the key locations, including the famous Knockan Craig, armed with copies of the maps used by the various factions together with their interpretations of the critical outcrops.

And we’ll discuss a modern controversy, surrounding the evidence for a meteor impact 1200 million years ago and the location of the crater itself. We’ll also take in the history and archaeology of human occupation in the NW Highlands before returning to Ullapool.

• Hotel: The Ceilidh Place, Ullapool
• Group dinner

On the last part of our journey we will travel across the glacial landscapes of the highlands, visiting Corrieshalloch Gorge to see the spectacular results of several episodes of Quaternary glaciation, and review the history of the Highland Clearances in the area. This period of intense suffering and disruption effects was felt all the way across the Atlantic with the surge in Scottish migration to the US which followed.

If time we will visit Loch Ness to assess sightings of ‘beasties’.

• Hotel: Coul House Hotel, Strathpeffer
• Group dinner

Savour your last breakfast at Coul House, then enjoy the journey back to Inverness to board the train back to Edinburgh late afternoon.

Note:  If required for reasons beyond our control, GeoCultura reserves the right to substitute alternative accommodation of equal or higher quality or adapt the itinerary if required.