Nobody lives in Skinsdale to speak of, which is more or less the point. The glen lies in the east of Sutherland, an empty fold of moorland and burn between the coast at Brora and Helmsdale and the great open bog country to the north-west, and the nearest towns of any size, Golspie, Brora and Dornoch, are all over twenty kilometres away. A road passes through this part of the country, but the glen itself is a place you look into rather than ride through.
What surrounds it is the Flow Country, the largest expanse of blanket bog in Europe, a wet, quaking mat of sphagnum moss that has been building for thousands of years and holds a great deal of carbon. In 2024 it was inscribed as a World Heritage site, which surprised some people who had always thought of it as wasteland. On a still, bright day it is anything but: pools shine like dropped coins, golden plover and greenshank call over the heather, and the smell is a mix of peat, bog myrtle and wet wool. In the right months you may see dragonflies hovering over the lochans.
The history here is as stark as the land. Nearby, in the Strath of Kildonan, a minor gold rush took place in 1869, when prospectors washed gold from the Kildonan Burn and a short-lived tented settlement sprang up, still remembered locally as Baile an Òir, the town of gold. It is a lovely, slightly absurd episode for a place that now has more deer than people.
The riding in this part of Sutherland is about space: long single-track and narrow two-lane roads, big gradients that you see coming for a mile, and plenty of places to pull in. The surface is mostly good, but sheep wander and the odd frost heave appears in spring. Pack a waterproof even on a clear morning, because the weather in this part of the Highlands changes its mind quickly, and take a flask if you can, because the cafes are few.