Talisker was for centuries a possession of Clan Macleod. A cadet branch of the chiefly line was founded here by Sir Roderick Macleod, 1st of Talisker, who lived from 1606 to 1675 and was knighted in 1661 for his services to the royalist cause during the civil war. He was the second son of Rory Mor Macleod, the chief who built so much of Dunvegan Castle. For nearly two hundred years the Macleods of Talisker held this corner of Skye, marrying daughters of Lord Reay and the Mackinnons, sending sons into the regiments of the Dutch and British service. John Macleod, 2nd of Talisker, who died around 1700, was the subject of an elegy by the blind harpist Ruaidhri Dall MacMhurich - the kind of small detail that says everything about how Gaelic Scotland recorded its own.

By the time the two English visitors arrived in 1773, the tacksman was John Macleod, 4th of Talisker, a Dutch-service officer permitted long absences in peacetime. Johnson liked him. Johnson liked his wife, who had picked up several languages while following her husband from posting to posting. The house Johnson saw was the predecessor to the present Talisker House, which was begun in 1717 and much extended through the 18th and 19th centuries. Boswell climbed Preshal More, the conical hill above the house, and was struck by its geological strangeness. The dining room of the present house has a plaster ceiling installed in 1865, when the bow window was added. The drawing room ceiling above it is original to about 1780. People still live in the house. It is listed but private.

In 1820 Donald Macleod, 6th of Talisker, sold his interest and emigrated to Van Diemen's Land - the colonial name for Tasmania. He took 36 Highlanders from his connection and a grant of 2000 acres. Five years later, Hugh MacAskill took over the Talisker estate and completed the clearance of the tenants that his predecessor had begun. Their houses came down. Their families were sent to the boats. In 1830 MacAskill founded the Talisker distillery five miles away at Carbost on Loch Harport, where there was peat and clean water. The name travelled with it. The whisky has been made on Skye continuously ever since, and "Talisker" today summons a bottle, not a place. MacAskill gave up his lease of the Talisker lands themselves in 1849, leaving the settlement gradually to its sheep and its quiet.

The two hills above Talisker, Preshal More and Preshal Beg, are not ordinary Hebridean hills. They are the remnants of intra-canyon lava flows from a long-vanished volcanic shield that sat above what is now the Cuillin. At their base the Preshal Beg Conglomerate Formation crops out, a sedimentary record of debris flows and alluvial fans that filled a valley before the lava poured in over them. The tholeiitic basalt that caps both summits is chemically distinctive, related to the Cuillin's intrusive rocks. To stand on Preshal More, as Boswell did, is to stand on the surviving tongue of a sixty-million-year-old eruption. NatureScot has designated the whole area a Site of Special Scientific Interest, partly for the geology and partly for the rare burnet moths that fly here, the Talisker burnet and the transparent burnet.

The Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, the greatest Gaelic poet of the 20th century, wrote of standing at Talisker Bay "where the great white mouth opens between two hard jaws," the headlands of Rubha nan Clach to the north and Bioda Ruadh to the south. The beach is a half-mile stretch of stone and sand, the sand mottled black and white where dark basalt has been ground together with paler quartz. The northern cliff carries an impressive waterfall that doubles in volume after rain. The southern is closed by a great sea stack. It is reached by foot from the road, and most visitors who make it down keep the place to themselves, as Johnson predicted they might.