PABAY: Skye’s jurassic island

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 Edinburgh-based 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 ‘flat 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.

Pabay may at first sight and from a distance have been unprepossessing. However, having the previous summer tantalised Ratcliffe Barnett before he managed to get over and spend a day there, he was moved to describe sun-kissed Pabay as ‘an Island of Revelations’. Why? Firstly, Pabay (as the derivation of the name hints – papar translates as priest island), was believed to have been home at one time to an early christian community, evangelists who had broadcast the ‘simple news of Christ in an age of dark deeds and pagan superstitions’. Secondly, and more pertinent here, by the early 20th century Pabay had also become a field geologists’ utopia, its place as such secured by the early Victorian Cromarty stonemason and pioneer geologist Hugh Miller who, as we will see, had extolled Pabay’s virtues as a bountiful source of fossils. With these, the ‘Man with the Hammer’ according to Ratcliffe Barnett, had ‘shed fresh wonder on the creation of the world’. Yet even prior to Miller’s visit, the island had already begun to attract the attention of some of the country’s leading geologists and mineralogists. It would continue to do so long afterwards too.

I know Pabay well and, like Ratcliffe Barnett, have often been spellbound. My late uncle and aunt tried to make a living there during the 1950s and 1960s. From the age of three I was on Pabay for part of virtually every year until my late teens when, owing to ill-health, my uncle Len was forced to sell. At the time none of us knew anything about Ratcliffe Barnett, although as we’ll see, my uncle was well aware of Miller’s enthusiasm for Pabay’s rocks.

Pabay’s place on the map

Skye’s importance for geologists, mineralogists and palaeontologists is now well-established. So too have become its credentials as one of Britain’s principal Jurassic zones, its reputation in this regard enhanced by the discoveries, the first of which was made in