Qualla: Staffin

Staffin: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit maproom, CC BY-SA 3.0. At low tide on a stretch of basalt shore called An Corran, dinosaurs left footprints in mud that hardened into stone, and then sat under salt water for one hundred and seventy million years until somebody finally noticed. Eighteen prints are now known, some up to fifty centimetres long, made by a large meat-eating theropod akin to Megalosaurus. The footprints are at Staffin - a small township on the northeast coast of Skye whose Gaelic name, An Taobh Sear, simply means The East Side. In 2010 the community was named Gaelic Community of the Year. A year later, a local crofter was making news for being one of the last people in Scotland still swimming his cattle across an open strait between grazings. Staffin is full of these unlikely pairings.

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Image: maproom | CC BY-SA 3.0

Staffin: The Township and the Ridge

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Lucas from Leicestershire, UK, CC BY 2.0. Staffin sits on the A855 about seventeen miles north of Portree, halfway up the Trotternish peninsula on Skye's eastern coast. Above it rises the Trotternish Ridge - the longest active landslip in Britain, whose famous fragments include the Quiraing to the north and the Old Man o...

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Image: Paul Lucas from Leicestershire, UK | CC BY 2.0

Staffin: Dinosaurs on the Tide

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phil Sangwell from United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0. The footprints at An Corran were properly described in 2002 in the Scottish Journal of Geology, in a paper that established their age and identification. They sit on a rippled wave-cut platform that the sea covers most of the time and only exposes at low spring tides, on an igneo...

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Image: Phil Sangwell from United Kingdom | CC BY 2.0

Staffin: A Living Gaelic Place

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carol Walker, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the 2001 census, sixty-one per cent of Staffin's population recorded themselves as Gaelic speakers - one of the highest proportions in the country. In September 2010, Comunn na Gaidhlig named Staffin its Gaelic Community of the Year, the first year the prize existed. The same ...

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Image: Carol Walker | CC BY-SA 2.0

Staffin: Crofters and Cattle

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Morgan, CC BY-SA 2.0. Just off the coast lies Staffin Island, a small tidal islet used for grazing. In 2011, Crofter Iain MacDonald was the last person known still to be moving his cattle there in the old way: rowing alongside in a boat, encouraging the animals to swim across the strait in early sprin...

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Image: Chris Morgan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Staffin: The Memorial Above the Bay

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mihael Grmek, CC BY-SA 3.0. The village war memorial stands on a small rise looking out toward Staffin Bay. It was built to remember the local men who died in the Boer War and the two World Wars - a familiar small-village stone in a country full of them. In 2015 the names on it changed. On the seventieth an...

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Image: Mihael Grmek | CC BY-SA 3.0