The High Pasture Cave is the second-longest recorded cave system in Skye, with a length of more than 320m (1,000ft). Between AD 70 and AD 135 the main entrance was deliberately buried under a mound of stone and midden deposits in a series of acts designed to conceal the cave mouth and prevent access.
Abandoned and forgotten, the cave system saw little in the way of activity for the next 1,500 years until the mid-18th century, when the blocking stones were used to construct a group of cellular structures to create a small shieling settlement. This provided a seasonal base for people living in the nearby Kilbride township for tending their livestock during the summer months, as part of the island’s transhumance-farming economy. The Highland Clearances brought these activities to an abrupt end in the mid-19th century, but livestock grazing continued, and some of the other shafts leading into the cave system were backfilled with domestic waste and discarded agricultural machinery, partly as a means of preventing livestock from falling into the cavities.
The island’s curving 8km (5-mile) outcrop of Cambrian Durness limestone was recognised to be a likely cave site by geologists and caving clubs, who began looking for underground systems in the 1960s and 1970s, especially at the boundary between the water-soluble limestone and the harder granite and sandstone outcrops. Over time, more than 100 caves amounting to 3km (1.9 miles) worth of passages were mapped, but most of them are short – less than 100m (330ft) between the point that their small streams sink and re-emerge.
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