Tokavaig Trip

A memorable night at Dunscaith Castle near Tokavaig

There are amazing spots around Skye that are tucked away a bit off the beaten track. While all the attention is focused on the honeypot locations like Storr and the Fairy Pools, it’s these little gems that I find much more attractive and interesting to explore.

Here we have Dunscaith Castle, of which there are numerous legends about warrior queens and suchlike that I won’t bore you with here. Instead, feast your eyes on a ruined ancient castle atop a rock stack overlooking Loch Eishort.

It’s fairly invisible from the road, and even when fairly close it’s not really obvious there’s a castle up there, let alone a dramatic stone bridge leading to it. It’s only when you get into a particular position that you can see through the arch of the bridge and the castle’s shape becomes more obvious.

For this shot, I wanted a clear night with decent moonlight - about half a moon so as not to overpower the stars too much. I also wanted to time it such that the tide was at the right height to be have the shoreline leading to the castle, rather than fully covering the rocky beach or being fully out. With tide timetables, moon position predictor, and weather apps all running I arrived to a cracking scene and got set up.

While it looks very bright due to the long exposure and moonlight, moving around on such a rocky beach, and clambering up to the vantage point I wanted on a little outcrop, is pretty perilous. It is very easy to slip on a wet rock and snap a leg. I did a nasty injury to my ankle last year in similar circumstances through not paying attention and rushing things, and also not having my arms free to balance properly. Caution is the way, along with a trekking pole for a 3rd touchpoint with the ground.

Once in position the photograph itself was a pretty easy job. The setup was my Sony A7III with 16-35 f/2.8 lens at 16mm, 15 sec exposure (not longer to ensure the stars stay as points not light trails), f/2.8 at ISO 4000. The moonlight coming from the left was very effective at lighting the scene and making it look a bit like daylight, but definitely not daylight. This is one of the things I find fascinating about night photography - you can get a very unusual “look” to the images in the right conditions.

This exposure also gave me really good detail in the sky, with a gazillion stars and a very slight aurora giving some purple colouration.

With the main shot “in the bag” I took the opportunity to grab a couple more on the way back to the car.

Tokavaig Cottages

I couldn’t resist this scene of the two cottages at the end of the track. All empty (they are rentals I believe), there was nobody around and I had the place all to myself. The Milky Way was fully up by this point and looking rather excellent in the sky. Again, I love the bright moon making it look like an early morning sunrise with sharp shadows, yet the sky is full of stars.

Same camera and settings as the castle shot.

Salt marsh reflection

And lastly, I’m a bit of a sucker for salt marshes. There’s something about the really clean delineation between the deep pools and the grassy land. I will often spend ages looking around them to find an oddly shaped pool that I can somehow construct into an attractively composed image.

I spent about an hour wandering around this one which is just on the way to the cottages in the previous shot. I knew there was something worthwhile if only I could work out the puzzle of pools, inlets, hummocks and grasses. After lots of trial and error I found this pool, and worked out a composition that would capture the moon’s reflection (a bit like the lochan shot a couple of posts ago) to emphasise the shape of the pool, but not have the moon actually reflected in the water to avoid it blowing out the exposure.

I ended up hiding the moon’d reflection in that sticky-out bit on the left of the pool. Same camera settings as the previous two images. If it works, don’t change it!

The stillness of that night was quite exceptional. Clear, cold, still. Quite amazing to be out. The combination of the puzzle-solving composition hunting, the atmosphere, the history of the place and the setting all combined to make for a really memorable night.