Four thousand cattle a year, lashed together by their horns, swimming the 550 yards of fast water between Skye and the mainland. That was Kyle Rhea before there was a ferry, before there was a bridge, before there was a road on either side worth the name. The cattle were bound for markets in the south, some as far as London's Smithfield, and Kyle Rhea was their first ocean crossing. The strait still runs at up to eight knots on the spring tide, white-capped and brisk in the narrow gap between Glenelg on the mainland and Kylerhea village on Skye. A ferry still crosses it, the last manually operated turntable ferry in the world.
Before steam and rail, Highland cattle walked to market. They walked from Skye and the Outer Hebrides, across these mountains, down the spine of Scotland to the great trysts at Crieff and Falkirk, and on to England. For the Skye cattle the first ordeal was Kyle Rhea. The drovers gathered the beasts on the western shore, tied their lower jaws to the tails of the animals ahead so they would not panic, and led them into the water with a man rowing the lead rope. They swam in a long chain across the strait while the tide ran. Some were lost. The crossings are described in records going back to the 17th century and continued well into the 19th. Sir Thomas Dick Lauder wrote about Kyle Rhea in his Highland Legends. The cattle trade carried Hebridean wealth, such as it was, eastward and southward; Kyle Rhea was its toll booth, paid in nerve and rope.
The first motor car ferry started here in 1935. The boat had a turntable on its deck so a car could drive on, be rotated, and drive off pointing the right way at the other end. The same principle still operates today on the MV Glenachulish, the last manually operated turntable ferry in service anywhere. She takes six cars per crossing, eighteen per hour, running between Glenelg and Kylerhea from Easter to mid-October. When the Skye Bridge opened at Kyle of Lochalsh in 1995 and made the seven-mile crossing redundant for traffic, the route nearly closed. Murdo Mackenzie kept it running for nearly twenty years as a private business. In 2006 the local communities on both sides bought the ferry and put it into community ownership. It survives now mostly as a tourist experience, the slow scenic alternative to the bridge, but it remains a working link with the old Skye routes.
The southern end of Kyle Rhea opens into the Sound of Sleat at Sandaig, a remote bay near Glenelg with a small cottage. Gavin Maxwell lived there in the 1950s and 60s with his pet otters, and wrote Ring of Bright Water there in 1960. The book is one of the most beloved nature memoirs in English, and the 1969 film made these waters known to a generation. Maxwell called the bay Camusfeàrna in his writing to protect its anonymity, but its real location was Sandaig. The original cottage burned down in 1968. Maxwell moved with his otters across the loch to Eilean Bàn under the Skye Bridge and died there the following year. The bright water of his title was Kyle Rhea and the sound beyond it, the same fast tidal water that the cattle drovers had cursed and the ferry now glides across.
Eight knots is a lot of water moving through a narrow gap. The strait still catches commercial ships out. In February 2018 the cargo vessel CEG Universe lost her rudder and ran aground near Glenelg; she was towed off to Kyle of Lochalsh. In February 2022 a fishing boat with electrical failure went on the rocks; the RNLI lifeboats from Mallaig and Kyle came out to tow her in. In August 2023 a 103-foot salmon farming well boat called Settler stuck at high tide, her crew taken off overnight for safety. In October 2024 an 88-meter cargo ship ran aground in the early hours and was refloated without injuries. A scheme proposed in 2010 to put four 1.2-megawatt tidal turbines in Kyle Rhea was eventually shelved when the developer changed hands and priorities shifted; for now, the tide flows untouched, just as it always has.
Strait position: 57.24 N, 5.66 W between Skye and the mainland. Roughly 4 nm long, 550 yards wide at its narrowest. Opens north to Loch Alsh, south to the Sound of Sleat. Nearest airport Inverness (EGPE) is about 80 nm east; Broadford airstrip on Skye sits 6 nm northwest. The strait is visually distinctive as a sharp blue line between the rounded mainland hills of Glenelg and Skye's Sleat peninsula; the Glenelg-Kylerhea ferry slipways are visible on both shores from Easter to October. Strong tidal rips cause white water at peak ebb and flood.