See also:
Summer Isles Kayaking Guide

What paddler can resist the thrill of poking their bow into a cave or threading a natural rock arch? Paddling under a bridge or into a boathouse just doesn’t have the same transgressive buzz.
Here are a few of my favourites, tracked down over many summers bobbing among the Isles. Most of the arches will need the top half of a tall tide, but add spring highs and a swell and some caves may require a hard hat too, or may just be too risky.

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Double Arch • Bottle Island
This was a great discovery – in under one arched slot with room enough below a collapsed roof cavern to turn for a paddle-stowed squeeze out of the other exit (above right) if the tide is high or the swell is right.
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Arch • Tanera Beg
The best known and best looking of kayaking arches in the Summer Isles (left). Not that easy to spot on the usual approach from the northeast I the Tanera channel, so start nosing around off the southeast side of Tanera Beg when the tide is high.
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Arch • Eilean Mullagrach
Another superb example of Torridian archmanship which elsewhere, in similar forms, may have given birth to the first architectural arch. Easy to find and get to as long as there’s a paddle in your hand and water under your boat.
There’s a cave behind the arch (both left) which, who knows, may one day link up with the other Mullagrach cave described  below.
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Deep Cave • Eilean Mullagrach
Just up the coast from the above arch is a hidden cave tucked in the back of a little cove – Am Fang on some maps. Look on a map or sat image and it very much looks part of the same fault as the arch above which burrows right along the eastern shore of Mullagrach.
We went back the other day for a closer look with a bit more tide but which did not please the birds nesting by the entrance (left) at all. We probably got within a boat’s length of the end, using the camera flash to navigate.
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Arches and Caves • Priest Island
We didn’t go right round the ‘Island of the Clerics’ but passed an arch approaching the Priest’s northern tip, and I read in Fraser-Darling’s Island Years that there are deep linking chasms – crawlable not kayakable –  around the northern point and another on the western end too.
On the east end of the ‘Acairseid’ or bay is a narrow cave as well as a tricky right-angled tidal slot alongside a stack (right; I may be conflating the two). There’s also a less a constricted passage through the skerries just round the corner.
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Cave • Tanera Beg
On the OS map this cave is near a point labelled Sron Ghlas on at the island’s south-southeast point. ‘Cathedral Cave’ is what the boat tours call it, as they can edge right in while the captain offers a rendition of ‘Danny Boy’.  With the daylight coming through the crack at the back (right), give it 100,342 years and they’ll have to reprint their brochures with ‘Cathedral Arch’.
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Double Arch • Sgeir Ribhinn
In a rush to get to see the main islands before the weather breaks, most would paddle by Sgeir Ribhinn, the easternmost of the three skerries south of the Taneras. But if you do pass close by, the one-kayak-wide geo on the upper east side will bring you into the cathedral gloom of big and small (left) arches overhead.
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There are more caves on the Coigach peninsula cliffs facing Enard Bay, northwest of Achnahaird plus some fun tidal passages in the Isles too. Here you can catch that serene Caribbean sensation of gliding on aquamarine glass over the sandy sea bed, if not always with tropical temps, balmy winds or reggae soundtrack. My favourite is the pass between Carn Iar and Carn Deas (left), just above Bottle Island, with a lovely sandy passage on the right of Deas. Carn nan Sgeir below Horse Island is another, though you’ve got to time both at high tides.

Sorry, nothing for you here, Game of Throners