An t-earrach – Spring on the Isle of Skye

Chef Clare Coghill runs Café Cùil on the Isle of Skye. She is a native, born and bred on the Scottish island, where her family have run a hotel for more than 100 years. Skye is blessed with ane exceptional range of seasonal local produce, and at Café Cùil, Clare and here team make the most of this, including foraging for wild ingredients which grow locally. If you have never tried a wild gorse flapjack (or latte) you don’t know what you are missing. Find out more below…

By Clare Coghill, March 2026

To me, Spring symbolises the start of new life on the Isle of Skye, from new lambs appearing in the nearby croft to reopening Café Cùil for the season.  

You always know that Spring has finally sprung on the island when the land starts coming back to life. Arguably, it’s my favourite time of the year, because it’s still relatively quiet, and you have the beaches and walking paths to yourself to go foraging. 

It’s no secret that the Highlands of Scotland endure one of the toughest winters in the UK, which spans from around October to March. Think 100mph gales, perpetual darkness and sideways rain. I always remember when I was younger getting on the school bus in the pitch dark at 8am, to only be dropped back home at 4pm in—you guessed it—the pitch dark. 

Those childhood memories have made me want to disappear from the Highlands during the winters, and I often take myself to a different part of the world where vitamin D isn’t seen as a luxury item. I do sometimes reflect on the generations that came before me on Skye, the harsh winters they must have endured with very little comfort (or ease of travelling abroad for that matter), and how much they must’ve been desperate for Spring’s arrival, not just for better weather, but for survival. 

I suppose, in a way, Spring is a sign of hope up here, and I like to celebrate it in the best way I know how—by cooking with the ingredients it provides. 

I am a proud native Gaelic speaker, and have always loved how the language is interwoven in with the seasons. We call Spring ‘an t-earrach’ which literally means for plants to spring forth from the ground. And the ground is exactly where I look when I start foraging for the year. 

I can’t talk about Spring without mentioning wild garlic. No Spring menu at Café Cùil would be complete without it. Wild garlic is my favourite ingredient by far to forage for in the spring months up here on Skye, mostly due to its powerful, punchy aroma and flavour. I tend to see the first green shoots of wild garlic around late February, but always wait another few weeks to allow them to grow before I start picking. 

Compared to some other foraged herbs, wild garlic can hold its own when up against the supermarket all-stars such as parsley and basil. You’ll often see us using it in our Cùil soups, butters, pickles and pestos, many of which you’ll find in our debut Café Cùil Cookbook. 

Everyone has their favourite spots for foraging wild garlic, but I believe mine is extra special. Firstly, you can only access it at low tide, meaning you have to be in tune with the land and pay attention to the sea before heading out (I’ve learned this the hard way!) 

Once you reach the patch, you’re then surrounded by a collection of derelict black houses, which would’ve been family homes in the eighteen and early nineteen hundreds. I never under estimate how special it is to be foraging for ingredients on the island I grew up in, surrounded by with natural beauty and history side by side. I’m often reminded of my youth when picking the wild garlic, as it’s one of the first wild herbs I identified with my mum. She would always encourage me to ‘follow my nose’ when seeking out wild garlic, and I still live by that today. 

If I had to choose, I’d say my favourite dish to create with wild garlic would be my ‘steak and eggs’ brunch classic, using seared local venison and wild garlic chimichurri. It’s really simple to put together but packs a punch on the plate. It’s one I’d definitely recommend trying at home.

Another mainstay on the spring menu is wild gorse. Gorse flower is one of those shrubs that pops up everywhere in the UK, from valleys to roadsides, but rarely get a second look culinarily. From January to June, it explodes with vibrant yellow flowers that give a malty, coconut scent. When the sun is shining, its sweet vanilla aroma sings through the air, and I love to smell every plant as I walk past in order to get my gorse ‘hit’. It’s certainly one of those hard-to-get plants though, with thorny bristles protecting its flowers, it can be an incredibly painful picking experience if you’re not concentrating!

Because of its flavour profile, I love to substitute it for coconut, which a lesser-known ingredient to the highlands. We dry out the flowers before sprinkling them through our flapjacks, and also create a gorse mascarpone to sit on top our rhubarb crumble pancakes. But one of my favourite uses of this fantastic yellow shrub at Café Cùil is our ‘Wild gorse latte’ which is a homemade concoction of gorse flower, white chocolate, ginger and fennel seed which we make into a tea before mixing with velvety warm milk. 

I love sitting down with the kitchen team in February to come up with fresh new ideas like this for the spring menu, and I’m constantly interested in finding new ways to work with wild foraged herbs. My hope is that the Café Cùil Cookbook will inspire others to reconnect with the natural larder that grows around them, wherever that may be. 

What makes Café Cùil so unique is the relationship we have with the island we live on. Skye has always been my home, and so I feel as though the connection I have with the people I grew up with and the ingredients that grow around us reignites my passion to create new dishes every year. Spring, I could argue is not only a sign of hope that the sun will shine again, but a reminder of how truly lucky I am to call this corner of Scotland home. 

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About the author

Clare Coghill grew up on Skye, where her family had owned a hotel for over 100 years. Despite a childhood immersed in the hospitality industry, she spent her twenties doing everything from training brewers at Tennant’s, pouring candles for an artisan candle company, and working as a TV researcher. After winning the title of Britain’s Best Home Cook on C4’s My Kitchen Rules, she started to think about returning to the world of hospitality. In 2019 she opened Café Cùil in East London. Following closure during the pandemic, the cafe relocated to the Isle of Skye, where the new location officially opened in 2022.

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