The sky and Skye

Just come back from the Isle of Skye… I couldn’t resist that for anyone who remembers Andy Stewart’s songs.

We enjoyed a wild and windy break up there, including a week without any internet connection out of choice, which proved a wonderful experiment in changing the way I live. I read a lot of books instead.

After more than 40 years acquaintance with the island, any trip there is full of memories, and reminders of change.

A closer world

The island has changed. The bridge that replaced the clanking ferry at Kyle has brought a better life for islanders. Shops, hospitals and the rest of the world are closer. Roads are better, much of it thanks to EU funding.

All this brings more visitors. New businesses, homes and shops dot the island. The roads are busy with cars, camper vans and tour buses. Newly built self-catering cottages and Air BnBs pepper the landscape with a new architecture.

Cafes and coffee shops, that could never be supported by local people alone, have opened providing work.

Nostalgia and despair

The old island that we fell in love with has gone. You won’t see a couple working their croft, side by side, cutting hay by hand, as we did on our first trip there.

Places we used to visit, where we never saw anyone else, now have car parks rammed full even in late September.

Nostalgia aside, there’s some despair. I don’t think anyone saw this coming. I don’t think anyone chose this.

Islanders trying to maintain a traditional life of crofting, fishing and getting by, confront a world that cannot be afforded, and wealth of a kind they’ll never know.

Futures

I’m pleased so many people have the chance to see and experience a place I love. Having a long background in tourism I want to see tourism succeed but can’t help feeling sorrow.

I’m not convinced this flood of tourists can be sustained. In a few years the camper vans may go. Hired for a couple of weeks, their drivers don’t rely on the island.

They’ll be gone, next year, to another beauty spot, another wild destination, which in its turn will need car parks in places no one used to visit. Skye is not the limit of our dreams, ambitions and hopes.

Unplanned

People trying to make a living on the island may become more and more frustrated by bad behaviour and crowded roads never built for camper vans or tour buses nor today’s modern super cars. I did become frustrated.

Concerns like these turn my thoughts to tourism and how we sustain its future. After more than 40 years working in tourism, in an organisation dedicated to making travel more accessible, I want generations to travel the world in the future too.

I worry that may not happen, and that as the cost rises, fewer and fewer will be able to travel.

Change and hope

We need a more sustainable tourism and, as an historian, I want to turn some attention to the past, and how all this came about, because we can learn from that. And because the past, if it shows nothing else, shows that we have changed.

If we have changed we will change again, and that means that we can change the future too, in ways that we want.

Notes

We rented our accommodation from people who live and make their living locally. It’s as much as we can do. That took years of knowledge and careful research.

Andy Stewart? More about him here. He and his songs were part of my childhood, some of it embarrassing. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-andy-stewart-1510366.html