The island of Pabay, a fi eld geologists’ utopia
Not much less than a century ago, in December 1925, The Scotsman published a short article written by a popular travel writer of the day, the Edinburghbased church of Scotland minister the Reverend Thomas Ratcliffe Barnet. With memories of the devastation wreaked by the First World War still fresh in the minds of readers who were also enduring a dreary winter, Ratcliffe Barnet’s aim was to evoke better times, and he thanked God for the ‘miracle of imagining which can dissolve a winter fog in a blaze of summer sunshine’. The mental ‘pilgrimage’ on which he took his readers was north-westward to Skye, the island that ‘has a story to tell… those who love her which no other Hebrid isle can tell’.
Some sixteen months later, Ratcliffe Barnett followed up his paean of praise for Skye by writing about a diminutive island that lies offshore in the south eastern corner of An t-Eilean Sgitheanach (Skye’s Gaelic name). This was Pabay, sometimes spelled Pabbay or Pabba, a ‘_ at circle of sheepgrass’ just over a mile across, three miles in circumference. Pabay lies low across Broadford bay - that is, between the Cuillins to the west and, northeastwards over the Inner Sound, the mountainous Applecross peninsula.