Impressions of Skye

Come over the sea to Skye in this award winning amateur colour film: the misty Cuillins, bustling Portree’s 1950s cars, buses and fashions, and the backbreaking work of a crofter.

Come over the sea to Skye in 1959, with its majestic mist-covered mountains, lush valleys and snug white-washed croft houses, in this award winning amateur film from Iain Dunnachie. See bustling Portree’s colourful 1950s cars, buses and fashions, and feel for the hardworking crofter in his backbreaking daily routine with peat to cut, haystacks to build, cows and toddlers to care for. Poetry and landscape combine in this moving and memorable film showing a lost way of life.

Dr Iain Dunnachie specialised in making comedy films about his family, as well as holiday documentaries in the 1950s, with titles such as ‘How Not to Bath a Baby’, about the mishaps befalling a dad giving a baby a bath, and the prizewinning ‘Oban 1951’, depicting the adventures of two children on holiday in Oban. He regularly competed at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, and won a number of awards, winning the Marshall Quaich for best entry for ‘Impressions of Skye’. After his success at the amateur film festivals, Dr Dunnachie received a number of commissions to make films during the 1960s and 1970s, with titles such as ‘Sutherland for Your Holiday’, focusing on aspects of Scotland’s landscape and heritage.