Most people who can sing the Skye Boat Song have never been to Skye.

It is a lullaby in houses where nobody has seen the Cuillin. Pipe bands play it at Highland games on the other side of the world. It is chosen for the funerals of people whose families left the Hebrides four or five generations ago. Since 2014 a version of it has opened every episode of Outlander.

Almost everything people assume about it is slightly wrong. It is not an old Jacobite song. The words were written in the 1880s by an Englishman. The crossing it describes is not the one you make when you go to Skye now, and the man in the boat was not going home.

None of that has stopped it working. This is an attempt to say why, by looking at where the song came from, what the crossing was, and what it is actually like to make it.

Where the song came from

The tune is older than the words, and the story Anne Campbell MacLeod later told about it begins in a boat.

In the 1870s, by her account, she was rowed across Loch Coruisk, the freshwater loch that sits inside the ring of the Black Cuillin. The men at the oars sang as they pulled. The song was a Gaelic one, Cuachag nan Craobh, "the cuckoo in the grove". She wrote down what she could remember of the air and later completed it herself. The first verse is included at the end of this post.

Gaelic has a word for this kind of song: iorram, a rowing song. The time is six-eight, and the lilt is the stroke of an oar, the pull and then the recovery. That is why the tune rocks. It is also why it works as a lullaby.

In 1884 MacLeod and Harold Boulton published a collection called Songs of the North. Boulton, an Englishman in his mid-twenties, supplied new words for her tune:

Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
Onward! the sailors cry;

He wrote about an event 138 years in the past. It was soon taken for a traditional Jacobite song, and it still is.

The crossing in 1746

The boat in the song did not cross from the mainland. It came the other way, from the Outer Hebrides, across the Little Minch.

Culloden was fought on 16 April 1746. By June, Charles Edward Stuart had been hiding in the Uists for weeks with a reward of £30,000 on him and the militia closing in. Flora MacDonald was twenty-four and from Milton in South Uist. Her stepfather, who commanded a company of that militia, wrote her a pass to cross to Skye with a manservant and an Irish spinning maid called Betty Burke. Betty Burke was the Prince in a dress.

They left Benbecula in an open boat on the evening of 28 June, with a handful of boatmen at the oars and the sail. It is more than thirty miles of open water. The wind got up in the night and then there was fog. At Waternish in the morning they were shot at from the shore. They rowed on across Loch Snizort and landed on Trotternish, in the north of Skye, below Monkstadt.

The song has Flora keeping watch while the Prince sleeps. The accounts taken down afterwards say it was Flora who slept, and the Prince who sat over her so the crew would not tread on her in the dark.

Skye was not a refuge. He was moved on to Raasay within three days and was back on the mainland within a week. He sailed for France in September and never saw Scotland again. The last verse of the song says he will come back. He did not.

Flora was arrested and held for about a year, latterly in London. She came home, married, and in 1774 emigrated to North Carolina, where her husband fought for the Crown in the American war, was captured, and the family lost what they had. She returned to Skye in 1779 and died there in 1790. She is buried at Kilmuir, on Trotternish, a few miles from where the boat came in. Her memorial there carries the judgement of Samuel Johnson, who met her: "a name that will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour."

So the woman at the centre of the song was herself an emigrant who came back. Most did not.

The crossing now

There are three ways onto Skye from the mainland today. The bridge at Kyleakin opened in 1995 and takes about a minute. The little turntable ferry at Glenelg runs in summer across Kyle Rhea, where drovers once swam cattle over the narrows. And the CalMac ferry goes from Mallaig to Armadale, across the Sound of Sleat.

Take the ferry from Mallaig. It is the only one of the three that feels like going over the sea.

It takes well under an hour. Behind you is Knoydart, which has no road in. Ahead is Sleat, low and green and wooded, not what people expect of Skye. To the south-west are Eigg and Rum. The Cuillin are not in front of you. They stand off to the north-west beyond the low ground, and on many days they are not there at all. The poetic Gaelic name for Skye is Eilean a' Cheò, the island of mist, and it is a plain description.

What you notice first is the cold. The sea here is only around 14°C even in August, and the air coming off it finds the gap at your collar on a hot day. Stand on the open deck anyway.

The second thing is the light. Skye is at 57 degrees north. The sun stays low, the showers come through one after another, and the light changes by the minute: a hillside lit and the water in front of it black, then the reverse. In June it is still light after ten at night. When the Cuillin do show, they show all at once, a dark saw-edge with cloud caught on it, and the whole deck goes quiet and gets its phones out.

It is not a dramatic crossing. Nobody is shot at. But there is a moment about halfway, when the mainland has gone flat behind and the island has not yet come into detail, when you are simply on the water between the two. That is the moment the song is about.

What it smells like

On the boat, honestly: diesel, wet rope, cold painted steel, and someone's coffee. Then the wind takes those away and you get the sea.

The smell of the sea is not salt. Salt has no smell. A large part of what people call sea air is dimethyl sulphide, a gas given off when bacteria break down a sulphur compound made by plankton and seaweed. It is sharp and slightly sweet. The edge people call iodine is not iodine either. It comes largely from bromophenols and other compounds in the kelp and wrack on the shore, and is strongest at low tide.

The island reaches you before you land. With the wind off Skye you get wet grass and bracken, and peat, which smells of earth and old smoke even when nothing is burning. Near the shore there is short turf with wild thyme in it, which you only smell when you walk on it. In boggy ground there is bog myrtle, roid in Gaelic, resinous and sweet. In August there is heather, though it is fainter than people think, closer to honey than to flowers.

And on the beaches there is driftwood. Wood that has been in the sea for a year loses its sap and its colour. What is left smells dry, clean and faintly salty. On a warm day it is the warmest smell on the shore.

Which way the boats went

Here is the fact that explains the song.

In 1841 about 23,000 people lived on Skye. Today it is about 10,000. In between came the potato famine, the clearances and decades of emigration, some of it chosen and much of it not. Ships took Skye families to Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, North Carolina, Victoria and Otago. For those people, over the sea meant away.

The song was published in 1884. Two years earlier, crofters at Braes near Portree had fought the police sent to evict them. The year before, a royal commission had toured the Highlands taking evidence of what had been done. The Skye poet Màiri Mhòr nan Òran was writing her own songs in Gaelic about the island she had left and the people being put off it. The emigrant communities abroad were by then two and three generations deep.

Into that came a song in English, with a tune from the Cuillin, in which the boat is going to Skye. Very little else in the repertoire did that. Most of the emigrant songs are about leaving. This one turns the boat round. For the four minutes it takes to sing, the singer is on the water heading in.

It does not matter that the Prince was a fugitive, or that most of the people singing it have no Jacobite sympathies and no intention of moving to Trotternish. The song is not really about him. He is barely described. What is described is the boat, the sea and the island ahead.

Robert Louis Stevenson saw this. Within a decade he had written new words for the same tune. He took the Prince out altogether and put himself in:

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say, could that lad be I?

His version is about his own youth, sailing those waters, and it ends "All that was me is gone." He spent his last years in Samoa and died there in 1894 without seeing Scotland again. The poem was published after his death. It is his words, lightly changed, that Outlander uses.

Gaelic has a word close to what both versions are doing. Cianalas means homesickness: the longing that comes of distance from home. Among emigrants' descendants it seems to reach further than memory. A great-grandchild in Dunedin can feel the pull of Skye without ever having lived there. The song gives it four minutes and a tune.

The scent

Our Over the Sea to Skye is named for the song and placed at Rubha Hunish, the northernmost point of the island.

It is the far end of Trotternish, the same peninsula the boat reached in 1746. From the old coastguard lookout on the cliff you look straight across the Minch to Harris and Lewis. Flora MacDonald's grave is a few miles down the road. If you want to stand on Skye and see the water the song is about, this is where you go.

The perfume opens with what perfumers call sea salt, which is really the smell of sea air, and with wild thyme from the turf above the shore. The heart is driftwood and heather. The base is ambergris and amber, which is where it stops being cold. It is salty and fresh at first and warmer as it settles, which is the order things happen in when you cross.

We did not put the diesel in.

It is our most popular perfume. It suits someone who loves the islands, or who lives away from Scotland and misses it. Over the Sea to Skye is 50 ml, and it is also in the Discovery Set if you would rather try it first. We can only post within the UK. In the USA our perfumes are stocked by Flykup.

How to make the crossing

Go by Mallaig, not the bridge. Stand outside for all of it. If the Cuillin are in cloud, that is the usual arrangement and not bad luck.

Then drive north. Trotternish is about two hours from Armadale and most visitors stop at the Old Man of Storr and turn back. Keep going to Kilmuir for the grave, and on to the road end at Shulista. From there it is a couple of miles over the moor to the lookout above Rubha Hunish. On a clear evening you can see Lewis, Harris and the Uists along the horizon from it, and in summer there are often minke whales in the tide off the point.

If you cannot go, the song is how people have always gone instead. It was made from a rowing tune, and it still takes you over at the speed of a rowing boat.

The Cuckoo of the Grove

A chuachag nan craobh, nach truagh leat mo chaoidh
Ag osnaich ri oidhche cheòthar?
Shiùbhlainn lem ghaol fo dhubhar nan craobh
Gun duin' air an t-saoghal fheòraich.

O cuckoo of the wood, are you not grieved at my mood,
Sighing on a misty evening?
I would wander with my love in the shade of the trees,
With no one in the world to question us.