The Fairy Glen of Uig

A landslip above Uig Bay left behind a landscape of conical hills and spiral earthworks so strange that locals named it the Fairy Glen — and Castle Ewen, its central rock tower, still looks unmistakably built rather than born.

Above Uig Bay on the Isle of Skye, an ancient landslip left behind a landscape unlike anywhere else on the island: a cluster of small, oddly regular conical hills, rippling grassy terraces, and a solitary rock tower rising from the middle of it all. Locals named the place the Fairy Glen, and gave the central tower its own name — Castle Ewen — for its resemblance, from a distance, to the ruins of a genuine fortification. The glen sits within a district thick with older legend. Nearby at Eyre, a set of standing stones marks the spot where local tradition holds that Fingal, the giant hero of Gaelic legend, once lit a campfire large enough to roast an entire deer. Uig itself takes its name from the Old Norse vik, a bay, a reminder of the district's Norse as well as Gaelic layers of settlement and story. The Fairy Glen's strangeness has, in recent decades, made it a magnet for a very different kind of folk practice: visitors leaving small stone spiral patterns and cairns across the terraces, a habit locals and conservation bodies have increasingly discouraged, since the site's actual value lies in the landslip geology itself, not in anything added to it. Even so, standing among the miniature hills at dusk, it is not difficult to understand why the name stuck.