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On the first day of our most recent visit to the Isle of Skye the children demonstrated a true sense of metropolitan entrepreneurship by creating a shop on the shore outside the house. The main structure was the shell of a wheelhouse from an old fishing boat which once belonged to an astonishingly fit distant cousin, who is still fishing at the age of 75. Around it they displayed interesting bits of seaweed, crab shells, fossils, an old anchor and handfuls of fresh shellfish, particularly limpets and mussels. They then tried to sell this eccentric stock to passing trade...although in the small waterside village of Heaste that market was limited to perhaps just three or four passers-by a day, not really enough to sustain a commercial enterprise.

Naturally we parents stepped in, buying merchandise whenever necessary - ie whenever the clamouring of the shopkeepers became too intense to withstand. Within a couple of days I'd a handy collection of salty objects by my bedside, the intensifying smell serving to remind me, if ever I woke up in the middle of the night, that the house was only a few metres from the sea.

Especially gratifying for the children were the meals we cooked with the mussels they had collected, and they were even more delighted when it turned out that many of those mussels had tiny pearls within them thanks to intruder grains of sand. I even heard one small voice point out that, owing to the obvious increased value of their merchandise, they should have charged us more than 2p apiece.

What with the demands of running a business and the pressures of stock rotation we barely saw the children for the first two days, and when they finally came in at the day's end they'd had so much fresh air that there was barely time to feed and wash them before they were asleep - which is entirely how a family holiday on the Isle of Skye should be.

We've been returning to Skye since I was a wee 'un - my mother's family comes from the island - but as the years have gone by I've begun to expect a chorus of groans when the time for the annual pilgrimage came up. After all, there's no TV or computer in the house we stay in, and little nearby in the way of shops, arcades or night life. Instead, there's just the ingredients that God supplies: air, sea, light and land, in their most unsullied form.

Personally, I take never-ending delight in the simplicity and beauty of these basic ingredients, and fortunately the children seem to appreciate them too, although they may not yet have the words to express that appreciation. Apart from the obvious physical attributes - the Cuillin mountains, empty beaches, wildlife, views of gunmetal seas over bladderwracked rocks - the island does not wear its heart on its sleeve. The villages are by no means pretty and the locals a bit shy, but there's something refreshingly honest and pure about all that freedom and fresh air, which still seems to strike a deep chord even with the PlayStation generation.

For me, one of its attractions over the years has been its steadfastness, a completely reliable friend. While the rest of life is like Hollywood - ever faster, more colourful, and with new special effects - the Skye holiday has always been in slow-moving black and white. But it is beginning to change, thanks to the arrival of the Skye bridge.

In my childhood days the island was a stronghold of Presbyterianism, and Sundays were for church-going and staying in; you'd even lock up your chickens to prevent them doing anything scandalous on the sabbath. Food was loosely based on mackerel and scones, with nary a vegetable spotted anywhere north of Glasgow. Entertainment was something you made yourself - just you, the hills, the rain and a small boat for Swallows-and-Amazon type adventures. But now there's coriander in the Co-op, tour buses that decant Europeans into places called the Skye Experience, and metropolitan types up for whizzy weekends of gastronomy and midges.

The Three Chimneys, up in the island's northwest corner, has attracted the most headlines of recent years, and is now rated as one of the top 50 restaurants in the world. But in my experience there has always been great food on Skye - it is just a matter of intercepting it on its short transfer between the fishing boats and the seafood lorries heading for Spain. Over the years we have bought lobsters, prawns, crabs and scallops on the shore outside the house, direct from the boats that landed them. All were still alive, of course - which has prompted a lot of consternation in the kitchen. That in itself was a lesson in the food chain, and at least the children knew it was safe to laugh when one of the local fisherman said "catching the fish is easy, the hard bit is catching the chips".

On the most recent visit we persuaded friends who live in Spain to join us, and together we headed out on expeditions across the headlands to abandoned villages and local waterfalls, singing to the seals, screeching at the eagles, and taking with us picnic ingredients which we cooked over driftwood fires.

There are, of course, two big factors to take into account before making plans for a day out on the island: the midges and the weather. The midges are the reason that I would advise anyone against camping on the island, but in the end they are not too much of a pest provided the wind doesn't drop, and provided you've come prepared. This time we invested in anti-midge hoods, which the children wore often and usually quite needlessly while fossicking along the shore. Wearing these things, they looked like members of some pint-sized terrorist organisation who were honing their assassination skills on unsuspecting crustaceans.

The weather is harder to plan for, and there will always be plenty of that thin Hebridean rain that coats you all over, and hangs frayed white rope of waterfalls in the mountains. In the event of totally washed-out days, Skye has developed its indoor attractions considerably in recent years, with the likes of Armadale's Clan Donald Centre (charting island heritage), Broadford's Serpentarium (tanks of snakes and reptiles) and an excellent newcomer in Kyleakin's Bright Water Visitor Centre (displays about otters and sea life).

On the whole, though, the Eames clan tends to ignore such synthetic entertainment, preferring to see Skye in the raw, whatever the weather. And we've been justly rewarded in the past, with a pair of pilot whales spending a week in the sea-loch right by the house one year.

Other than essential visits to the shops, the only real reason we ever leave Heaste and its immediate hills and shore is to go walking. Our children are still a bit young to tackle the Cuillins themselves, although on a couple of occasions we've headed across the saddle of Blaven, a gentler member of the Cuillin clan, to admire the ring of peaks hanging over Loch Coruisk.

Mostly we've headed north, with an obligatory stop in the island's main town of Portree for tea and scones, and then walked along the grassy ledge of the Quirang to where the path suddenly steepens amongst slabs of stone. Or else we've clambered up through a rare patch of woodland to the Old Man of Storr, a mighty pillar of rock set in an otherworldly Lord-of-the-Rings type landscape, where the children have traditionally played hide and seek. They've always seemed to be having a good time.

As part of her homework last autumn, my eight-year-old daughter had to draw a picture on the theme "when I was happiest." She chose to draw a tiny island with a boat, some seagulls, and a ring of seals out to sea. In the caption she described how we'd motored out to that island, grilled sausages on a driftwood fire and sung songs to the seals. She didn't mention that it rained.

That piece of homework earned more than just a house point from her teacher; it brought a tear to her father's eye. The fact that my offspring show real enthusiasm for the birthplace of my grandfather warms the cockles of my heart, and it means that my unbroken 45 years of annual pilgrimages to the Isle of Skye will continue, with no three-line whips required.

After so many years of Skye holidays, I still derive spiritual refreshment from the island and the children still return with something extra in the tank, looking healthy and happy. I don't quite know what that secret ingredient is, but as long as they don't start to object to heading north, I don't care.

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