A longish but fairly easy walk mostly along a clear and way marked track. Allow 4 -5 hours to include stops to admire the stunning scenery and time to log other caches en route. Well worth the effort.
You will find it difficult to imagine that this remote part of Skye was once a series of busy settlements.
In the early part of the 18th Century, Lady Grange wife of an MP was imprisoned in a cave near here. Lady Grange hoped to “persuade” her husband to give up his London mistress by threatening to reveal his association with the Jacobite plots, but her husband and friends had other plans and abducted her from her Edinburgh home. She was transported as “cargo” to St Kilda (GC10NMP and GC30 4NF), where she spent several years in miserable isolation, unable even to communicate with the local inhabitants as she did not speak Gaelic.
Eventually, she managed to get letters to people who might have rescued her but her husband’s associates got there first and relocated her to Skye – via the cave in Idrigill, where some accounts claim she was forced to live for 18 months. In 1745, she died on Skye and was buried at Trumpan church (GC1WGR).
Probably the same cave was used in the early 19th Century by William Macleod, owner of Orbost House. The people of Skye were destitute and starving as a result of the potato famine. William Macleod had his own way of surviving the recession –he cleared the settlements to make room for stock – sheep and cattle. As a side-line, he did a bit of smuggling, using the many coves along this coast to bring ashore and conceal contraband.
By 1877, the area was depopulated but one house was occupied in 1901 and was inhabited until 1955.
The cache is a plastic tub in a camo bag, placed behind a grassy mound at the edge of a large flat area.
Please park at Orbost Farm. There is no public vehicular access beyond this point.
The cache is placed with kind permission of HIE, who purchased Orbost Estate in 1997, in order to create new opportunities for sustainable rural development in this remote area.