In Kylesku, a Dream Come True
Home of Scotland’s highest waterfall
Our trip to Scotland is all about making dreams come true. Teresa (the lassie I love so much I married her) and I have driven through the rugged Highlands five previous summers (pre-Covid), but always for a few short weeks at a time. Too often, we set agendas that were too ambitious and did not give us enough time to linger in special places we discovered along the way. Kylesku was one such place.
We had stopped there for lunch every time we passed through on earlier trips, but never stayed over to explore Loch Glencoul, which laps against Kylesku’s shore — a vast, blue, sea loch, bounded by steep, gray-green hills. Kylesku (pronounced “Kyle-skew”) is not a town, not even a village; it’s just the site of an old dock for the ferry that used to cross the narrowest part of the loch, with a hotel-restaurant and a gift shop beside it (see photos above and below). Teresa had tried to book it for many years, but there was never a vacancy and there are only 12 rooms. This year we got lucky!
For decades that ferry crossing made possible the only southern land route connecting the northwest coast to the rest of Scotland. The ferry was replaced by a bridge in 1984, which pretty well negated the hotel-restaurant’s reason for existence. Logically, the place should have gone out of business. Yet the Kylesku Hotel thrived, in good part because of the vibe of the place: a fusion of traditional Scottish pub and hip, cozy bistro.
Kyle means “narrows” in Gaelic, and sku means “narrows” in old Norse. So the redundancy in the name shows the influences that shaped this region in the centuries before English tongues wagged over Scotland. Indeed, the Viking influence on Northwestern Scotland is so profound, the whole region is called Sutherland — southland! — which is only south if you are sailing there from Norway.
So, in 2024, we booked two nights at the Kylesku hotel, to give ourselves time to explore the area slowly. No more dine and dash: we would eat at our leisure, we would lounge, we would linger.
The reality, of course, sometimes does not quite live up to the dream. Something has changed about the hotel. The restaurant decor has been refurbished in pale and tan furniture and whisper-soft painted walls. The homey pub is gone; a very nice, but somehow bland seafood restaurant took its place. Oh, the food is great, all locally-sourced, and they even serve gluten-free fish and chips. For someone like me with Celiac disease, that’s a ticket to paradise (I ordered F&C for dinner two nights in a row). Even “foodie” Teresa loved the food. She said it was the best fish and chips she’s had in the UK.
We eventually learned from some of the other patrons that the hotel-restaurant had been sold about five years previously by the two women owners who had made it so authentically awesome to begin with. An upscale boutique hotel corporation owned it now. Ah, well, that explained the bland-tan of it all, and the loss of that quirky, personal touch. The outdoor flowerpots were full of weeds and cigarette butts — that would have never happened under the previous owners.
Of course, none of that changed the splendors of the surroundings. Our first afternoon, I went for a hike in the hills round Loch Glencoul. This was my first tromp in the wilds since our return to the Highlands (thanks to rainy weather), and I simply relished the feeling of slogging up a damp, overgrown trail.
Every now and then I would come across a small, hidden loch high in the hills, like this one (above), with a tiny rowboat in it. I kept climbing, until I got a good view of the whole length of Loch Glencoul. From this vantage, one could clearly see just how narrow the Klyesku narrows are. But also, how empty and wild this rugged green land remains.
From this vantage I could see strings of buoys stretched out on the far-north part of the loch (see upper left of the photo above). These, I later confirmed, were a mussels farm. Mussels, it turns out, are one of the best sea-food farms imaginable. While salmon farms have a terrible polluting impact on Scottish waters, mussels actually improve the water quality of a loch. They grow along lines that run from the bottom to the surface, and feed by straining plankton from the seawater as it naturally flows with the tide through the loch. Their straining action filters out impurities, cleaning the water. I realized the moule-frites I had for lunch in Kylesku were from this farm— and those were the freshest, sweetest mussels I have ever eaten.
On the walk back to the hotel, I discovered a profusion of wildflowers along the way — including patches of bright-yellow wild iris.
Our second day, and truly the highlight of our stay, we took a boat trip to the very end of Loch Glencoul, home of Scotland’s highest waterfall, Eas a’ Chual Aluin, which is Gaelic for “The Waterfall of the Beautiful Tresses.” The Kylesku Boat Tours runs three times a day from the former ferry pier. It’s a one-man operation piloted by Captain Michael, who appears to have the best job in the world, sailing tourists around this wild loch, only when the weather is good.
Along the journey, Captain Michael told us to keep our eyes peeled for seals on the shore, eagles in the sky, and stags in the hills. We scored two out of three. Michael pointed out six stags high in the hills; we could just make out their curving antlers against the skyline. We also sighted over a dozen grey and common seals basking on the rocks along our route. The eagles, however, were taking the day off from flapping about the loch. Michael shook his head. Those lazy apex predators.
The waterfall at the end of the loch is not only the tallest waterfall in Scotland, but in the whole United Kingdom. With a drop of 200 m (660 ft), Eas a’ Chual Aluinn is nearly four times taller than Niagara Falls, but can only be seen by boat from the very end of the loch. Michael explained, as we motored on, that one may also view the falls from above by hiking a six-mile (ten km) trail from the highway through muddy bog and steep slippery patches of rock — steep, slippery patches which have in fact claimed a few lives over the years…
Our boat ride had at first seemed like a lark, but after Michael’s explanation of the mucky alternative, it now felt like a luxury to be able to see the falls without the travails of the trek.
When Eas a’ Chual Aluinn finally came into sight, it surprised us. The falls fairly shoot out the side of the mountain and into the air like a horizontal geyser. Michael told us one of the strangest things about the falls is that there is no lake nor river visible in the land above, just a great big bog. That bog holds moisture like a giant sponge. Water seeps down onto the bedrock of impermeable Lewisian gneiss, where it forms an underground river that gushes forth from a hole in the mountain’s side, especially after a few weeks of rain.
When you think about it, very few natural wonders (“largest waterfalls in the UK! “) have such little fuss made about them as Eas a’ Chual Aluinn. We did not even know about the falls when we signed on for the tour of the loch. Canada and the US built a whole town and a whole tourist industry around Niagara Falls— including a fleet of tour boats over the years, viewpoint restaurants, light shows, and so many souvenir shops. But here in the Highlands, Michael and his little boat have an absolute lock on the loch. One can’t even buy a t-shirt with a picture of the falls on it at the little gift shop back at the dock.
Having delved deep into the wonders of Loch Glencoul, Teresa and I felt well-satisfied with our stay in Kylesku. A full five weeks of slow travel along the northwest coast now lay before us. Next up: the weird, hump-backed mountains of Assynt and Coigach, where we would stay for the following two weeks. We could feel ourselves falling in love with the Scottish Highlands all over again. To be here once more is truly a dream come true.