Staffin sits on the A855 about seventeen miles north of Portree, halfway up the Trotternish peninsula on Skye's eastern coast. Above it rises the Trotternish Ridge - the longest active landslip in Britain, whose famous fragments include the Quiraing to the north and the Old Man of Storr to the south. What people call "Staffin" is really a parish of twenty-three small townships strung along the coast from south to north: Rigg, Tote, Lealt, Lonfearn, Grealin, Breackry, Culnancnoc, Valtos, Raiseburgh, Ellishadder, Garafad, Clachan, Garros, Marishader, Maligar, Stenscholl, Brogaig, Sartle, Glasphein, Digg, Dunans, Flodigarry and Greap. Each is a handful of houses on a croft road. Together they form one of the most cohesive Gaelic-speaking communities left in Scotland.

The footprints at An Corran were properly described in 2002 in the Scottish Journal of Geology, in a paper that established their age and identification. They sit on a rippled wave-cut platform that the sea covers most of the time and only exposes at low spring tides, on an igneous bench that has natural cracks often mistaken for prints. Real prints have a distinct three-toed shape, deeper at the front than the back, sized for an animal walking with serious weight on its feet. An Corran is more than dinosaur. It is also a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer site dating to the seventh millennium BC - one of the oldest archaeological sites in Scotland, linked to the rock shelter at Sand, Applecross, across the Inner Sound. The same beach holds the marks of feet that arrived ten thousand years ago and feet that arrived a hundred and seventy million years before that.

In the 2001 census, sixty-one per cent of Staffin's population recorded themselves as Gaelic speakers - one of the highest proportions in the country. In September 2010, Comunn na Gaidhlig named Staffin its Gaelic Community of the Year, the first year the prize existed. The same month, Highland Council launched a consultation to convert the local primary school into a Gaelic-medium school. Only five of the thirty pupils had English as their only language; the rest were already bilingual at home. Staffin would become the second school in Scotland to make the switch, after Bun-sgoil Shleite on the southern part of Skye. Language survival in the Highlands is partly economic, partly emotional, partly stubborn. Staffin manages all three.

Just off the coast lies Staffin Island, a small tidal islet used for grazing. In 2011, Crofter Iain MacDonald was the last person known still to be moving his cattle there in the old way: rowing alongside in a boat, encouraging the animals to swim across the strait in early spring and back again in October. This is the kind of practice that disappears quietly, one retirement at a time. The Staffin Community Trust has been working since 2013 to keep both the working culture and the landscape visible to visitors. With Heritage Lottery funding, the Trust built the Skye Ecomuseum - Druim nan Linntean, the Ridge of Ages - a network of outdoor interpretive sites stretching from Loch Langaig at Flodigarry down to the Old Man of Storr, with new paths, viewing platforms at Lealt Gorge, and signage that explains the geology, the dinosaurs, the clearance ruins, and the Gaelic place names.

The village war memorial stands on a small rise looking out toward Staffin Bay. It was built to remember the local men who died in the Boer War and the two World Wars - a familiar small-village stone in a country full of them. In 2015 the names on it changed. On the seventieth anniversary of the 3 March 1945 crash of a US Army Air Forces B-17G into Beinn Edra, the ridge that rises behind Staffin, the community added the names of all ten American airmen who died there. Most had families far away. None had any connection to Skye until the day they fell on it. Staffin claimed them. The Crofters' Memorial Sùil nam Brà is now being built at nearby Kilt Rock by the same community trust, to honour the families who lived and were cleared from these crofts in earlier centuries. Memory here is something people work at.