Lean To Coffee

Cinnamon buns, traybakes and a sourdough toastie

The food is the strongest reason to stop. Pastries are made in house, and the counter runs to cinnamon buns, traybakes, assorted cakes and breakfast bowls built on the shop's own granola.

The savoury order is a sourdough toastie, at its best in the version with cheese, wild venison salami, pickled red onion and tomato chutney, on sourdough from the Skye Bakehouse. Cakes change with what has been baked, and the traybakes are the reliable fallback once the buns have gone. That is close to the whole range, and it suits the setting: bakes, bowls and quick savoury things rather than a hot-food menu that would need a kitchen twice the size.

A shipping container beside a croft ruin

Lean To Coffee sits on a family croft at Ashaig, just outside Broadford, and the structure is half the appeal. It is part ruined cottage and part converted shipping container, the container clad in wood and set beside the old croft house.

Seating is benches, reclaimed chairs, makeshift tables and old barrels, some of it under a Perspex roof and some of it open to whatever Skye is doing that day. The shop's own phrase, pastries and brews with views, is a fair summary. It is family friendly and informal, and the weather is part of the visit rather than something the room shuts out. The croft is a working one, and the coffee shop reads as an addition to it rather than a business that landed on a field.

Specialty coffee, without the ceremony

The coffee is specialty, made simply, and the pitch is quality ingredients and straightforward things done well in a good-humoured setting. That is the right expectation for a counter this size on a working croft: a good cup handed over quickly, drunk outside, with the ruin and the view doing the rest.

For a short stop on the way through south Skye, order a cinnamon bun or a traybake with the coffee. If the stop is standing in for lunch, take the Skye Bakehouse toastie instead, and a breakfast bowl if the morning started early and the day is going to be long. Then take it to one of the barrels and give it ten minutes, because the view is the other half of what you came for.