The Quiraing

Skye crofters once drove their cattle into this landslip-carved hideaway to keep them safe from Norse raiders — the flat, hidden grassland at its heart is still called the Table.

The Quiraing, on the Trotternish peninsula of Skye, is part of the largest active landslide complex in the British Isles, a slow-moving collapse of the ridge above that has, over thousands of years, carved out a maze of collapsed terraces, pinnacles, and hidden hollows running for over twenty kilometres along the Trotternish ridge. Its name comes from the Old Norse Kvi Hringr — "round fold" — a description that points directly to its historical use. During the era of Norse raiding on the Hebrides, roughly the 8th to 11th centuries, local communities are said to have driven their cattle up into the Quiraing's hidden interior, to a flat, grass-floored hollow known as the Table, concealed from the sea and the raiding parties below by the towering rock walls on every side. Local tradition holds that as many as four thousand head of cattle could be hidden there at once, invisible to anyone passing on the coast below. The Gaelic-speaking communities of Trotternish wove the wider landscape into their own mythology over the centuries that followed, associating the black, twisted pinnacles above the Table with giants and old spirits of the land — origin stories reaching for an explanation for rock formations that, in truth, geology alone is dramatic enough to account for.