If you think winter in Skye is the sole preserve of the seasoned mountaineer, it’s time to think again, says Ben Winston.

If you were teaching a dog to fetch, you wouldn’t cast your stick across six busy lanes of the M1. That’s advanced stick collection. Similarly, if you were teaching a child to swim, you wouldn’t toss them into the shark-infested waters off the Cape of Good Hope and shout cheery encouragement. That’s advanced freestyle training.

Curiously, it’s not much different when it comes to Scottish winter walking: you don’t try and introduce your friends to what is at the best of times a unique and somewhat mixed pleasure by taking them to Skye. Home of the Black Cuillin, the most jagged peaks in Britain’s largely rounded mountain portfolio, this simply isn’t the place to strap newbies into crampons, hand them an axe and point enthusiastically up the hill.

At least that’s what I thought when I started thinking about Skye for New Year with a bunch of friends who hadn’t done much winter hill walking. The island hadn’t been our first choice, but when your planning is as good as ours (“Of course I know it’s November… What do you mean, ‘a bit late’…?”), you don’t turn down offers on grounds of mere geographical inconvenience. That’s why I sat forlornly studying the fat tangle of contours of the Black Cuillin and thinking we weren’t going to be doing much hill walking. There was the Red, of course, but the tales of big, bouldery scree and twisted ankles were hardly inspiring. The coast? Well, it was better than nothing…

WATCH: Winter skills 1.1: choosing winter boots and crampons

When it actually came to travel to Skye, we were lucky to make it. The drive north was a long one made epic by blizzards beyond Fort William and a road that was quickly banking out, but we knew that with the Gulf Stream massaging the island, the weather on Skye was more likely to be wet than frozen. We were wrong.

When we woke that first morning the hills were thick with fresh snow, whipped by a chill northerly but lit by a brilliant winter sun. We decided on a short walk from Talisker Bay as the ideal way to loosen legs made stiff from travel, as the place had been recommended by a local as one of the finest places on an already fine island. And so it turned out to be: low, golden light; dramatic cliffs; a lone dog on the skyline barking manically at the wind; a pair of sea eagles startled as we came over a rise. The magic of Skye was at work on my friends, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off the distance where the Black Cuillin stood brilliant in white. “Are we climbing up those?” they asked, noticing my abstraction. “I doubt it,” I said.

With the Red Cuillin also transformed by the snow, walking the following morning was much easier than it could have been. We set off up Glamaig, an odd, short, low hill that makes up for a lack of stature with a brutally steep ascent. On top the wind was whistling spindrift, but the air was crystalline with views across Skye, across the Black Cuillin and across a vast stretch of the mainland. “I never knew it was as beautiful as this up here” someone commented. “It’s not often,” I said, “that it is.”

WATCH: Winter skills 1.3: how to choose an ice axe

In line with the steady progression that was taking place as the days passed, the growing confidence of the team and the willingness to tackle more hills, we set off the following morning for our most ambitious walk yet. It started from the fabled Sligachan Hotel and swiftly climbed the long, high ridge of Druim na Ruaige on Beinn Dearg Mheadhonach, leaving us free to enjoy a steady ascent and a wide panorama of winter excellence. Again the weather was holding with an uncharacteristic clarity and again my friends marvelled at Scotland.

By the time we reached the summit, hysteria was beginning to break out, precipitating snowball fights, sledging, drift diving and other wholly inappropriate mountain behaviour. Races down gentle slopes through deep snow were a favourite, frequently ending in face plants and hopeless, irrepressible laughter. We ate a long, lingering lunch while wrapped up on the summit and committed to memory and film the sort of experience that makes you wonder why Scotland can’t be like this all the time. Then on the way down, in the long, purple dusk of that winter evening, the moon came out to light our final steps back to the pub. This, everyone realised, is why people travel so far for the mountains. This, they said, was why they’d come back again.

Next morning it was back to form as Skye was on the receiving end of a massive storm. Winds to 90mph and rain as thick and heavy as mercury meant the mountains were clearly out, and I was part vindicated in my long insistence of what is normal weather in Scotland. Instead of going up we went west, to the end of the earth and the most exposed headland we could find. And once there at Neist Point we tried to walk in the wind, performed ten foot long jumps with ease and got blown over so many times that nothing much mattered any more. It was winter walking of a sort, but it brought home the fact that on Skye on the 31st December, you really don’t have to be up a mountain to have a Big Experience.

That evening we celebrated in what some would call a royal fashion. I don’t remember much of it other than, at some time in the darkness of the morning, looking up into the sky and trying to work out if it was the northern lights that were shimmering, or my mind. I went to get a second opinion, but both that and the third and fourth were all inconclusive. But back inside for a final dram around the fire there was no debate: winter walking on Skye, we agreed, was indisputably great. 

Ben Winston sadly died in 2015: Remembering Ben Winston

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