The Black Cuillin do not ease you in. From Glen Brittle the ridge shows itself as a wall of dark rock, more than eleven kilometres of it, holding eleven Munros above three thousand feet. This is exceptionally rough mountain ground, all bare gabbro and basalt, the eroded remains of a magma chamber that cooled around sixty million years ago. Gabbro grips the sole of a boot like sandpaper, which is part of why climbers keep coming back. It also carries enough iron to pull a compass needle off true, so on a misty day route finding falls to the map, the guidebook and the shape of the rock itself.

Sgurr Alasdair is the high point at 992 metres, reached up the Great Stone Chute, a long run of scree that lifts out of Coire Lagan. The peak that stops most people is smaller. The Inaccessible Pinnacle is a fin of rock perched on the summit of Sgurr Dearg, and it is the only Munro you cannot walk up. Reaching the top means a roped climb along a blade of rock with a long drop on either side, graded Moderate on the east ridge but exposed enough that the grade stops feeling reassuring. You come off it by abseil. The Pilkington brothers first climbed it in 1880, and it has been the final obstacle in many a round of the Munros ever since.

None of this is a walk in the ordinary sense. The scrambling is sustained, the weather turns fast, and a clear morning can close in by lunch. Late spring to early autumn gives the longest settled spells, though nothing on the Cuillin stays settled for long. Come for the ridge itself, and treat a full traverse as a mountaineering objective rather than a hillwalk.

North of the Cuillin the ground turns strange. The Trotternish peninsula runs as a long escarpment of ancient lava, and the whole of it slipped at some point, basalt up to three hundred metres thick sitting on soft Jurassic rock that gave way beneath the weight. The Quiraing is the one stretch still moving. Each year the single track road at its foot cracks and bulges and needs patching, which tells you the hill has not finished.

The circuit is about six and a half kilometres and takes a couple of hours, though the pull of it is not distance but shape. You walk in beneath cliffs to a set of formations that have earned their own names. The Prison is a blunt tower of rock that reads like a ruined keep from the path. The Needle is a spike some thirty seven metres tall, standing clear of the scree. Behind them, hidden until you climb up through a gap, sits the Table, a flat green plateau that slipped down whole from the summit and now lies ringed by rock, invisible from below.

The far west of Skye ends in a finger of rock at Neist Point. The road runs out near Waterstein, and from the car park a concrete path drops steeply to the headland, steep enough that a metal handrail runs alongside the worst of it. Near the top an old crane still stands, once used to winch supplies down to the lighthouse before the road reached this far. The lighthouse itself sits at the very tip, white against the sea, and has kept watch here since the early twentieth century.

The rock underfoot is basalt, broken into the same columns you find at the Giant's Causeway, and geologists reckon the two belong to the same ancient flow. Across Moonen Bay to the south rises Waterstein Head, a wall of cliff around 296 metres high and the second highest sea cliff on the island. West, on a clear evening, the Outer Hebrides sit low on the horizon across the Minch. One warning is worth taking seriously. There are no fences at Neist Point and the cliffs fall sheer, so keep well back from the edge, especially in wind. In summer, arrive an hour or so before sunset if you want room to park.