Marine archaeologist Dr Colin Martin called the discovery 'a highway into history' and noted that no other site quite like it has been identified anywhere in Scotland. Loch na h-Airde is a small body of water near the western tip of the peninsula, separated from the sea by only a few hundred metres of land. The canal that the Vikings dug along the line of the natural outflow stream allowed boats - faerings, birlinns, larger galleys - to be floated into the calm inland water at high tide. Once inside, they could be repaired, refitted, hauled out onto stone slipways, or simply moored out of weather. Historic Environment Scotland now lists the site as 'a rare medieval harbour complex' with quays, noosts, canal, and boat fragments likely surviving in the loch bed. In 2017 it was designated a historic monument of national importance.

The Viking harbour is only the most recent significant archaeology. The peninsula contains a Mesolithic rock shelter dating back perhaps eight or nine thousand years, used by the first known human inhabitants of Skye. A chambered cairn from the 2nd or 3rd millennium BC sits to the north of the loch - Neolithic farmers buried their dead inside it. A passage grave nearby reflects the same culture's funerary practices. South of the loch, an Iron Age dun - a small defensive enclosure - gave the peninsula its name: Rubh' an Dunain means 'point of the dun'. The site has been occupied or used by sea-people, in one form or another, for almost the entire span of human presence in Scotland.

After the Vikings the peninsula passed into the hands of Clan MacAskill, a sept of Clan MacLeod. They were Coast Watchers and bodyguards to the MacLeod chiefs at Dunvegan - hereditary defenders of the western seaboard, well placed to spot trouble approaching from the Atlantic. By the early 19th century the Rubha an Dunain farm extended to 37,500 acres and supported about seventy men plus families. Then came the Highland Clearances. The MacAskill leaders emigrated to the United States, New Zealand, and Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. By 1861 the census recorded nobody living on the peninsula. The 18th-century tacksman's house still stands in ruin, along with the stone walls of crofts that once held families now scattered across the New World.

There is no road. To reach Rubha an Dunain you walk - about five miles each way from the end of the road at Glen Brittle, along a rough track that follows the coast around the southern flank of the Cuillin. The path crosses bog, scrambles over rocky shoulders, and skirts the foot of Sgurr nan Eag. Looking inland, the Black Cuillin rise nearly vertically above; looking out, Rum and Eigg sit on the horizon across the sea. The peninsula itself is low - rising only to thirty metres above sea level - with the loch lying like a green disc in a hollow. Otters fish along the burns. A small empty bothy stands where the MacAskill farm once was. Down at the canal, the stones the Vikings cut a thousand years ago still hold their courses, waiting for tides that no longer matter.