The bar at the Ballygrant Inn holds over 450 malt whiskies, which is a lot for a village whose houses you can count. It has been named Whisky Bar of the Year twice, and Scotland's Best Whisky Bar in 2018, and from the bar you can look out across the Sound of Islay to the Paps of Jura. A dog and a cat live here, and reviewers tend to mention finding them at the bar or curled up in the reading room.
The Inn is the village's only pub, run by David and his son Ewan, out on the A846 towards Port Askaig, three miles up the road where the ferry sails from. The food is homemade and mostly local: chicken, ham and leek pie, Islay beef, lamb and venison, and seafood pulled from the surrounding water — scallops, crab, lobster, langoustine. Thursday is curry night, and the reviews are firm on this point, one visitor noting the curries "would have been well received in an Indian Restaurant."
For a village this small, Ballygrant has held on to both a shop and a village hall, which is more than most places its size manage. There was a café called Labels with tables outside, though a blogger who caught a coffee there in 2019 arrived just as it was about to close, and it may not trade any longer.
The walking is the reason to stay. From the Dunlossit Estate car park, down the Mulindry road, a long, easy circuit takes in the estate's lochs and woods, then minor roads with the Sound on one side, before detouring to the Caol Ila, Ardnahoe and Bunnahabhain distilleries and looping back to Finlaggan — six to nine miles depending on how many distilleries you visit. There are shorter options: woodland tracks around Loch Ballygrant, a path through to Port Askaig, and a fifteen-minute causeway walk onto the island at Finlaggan. Three lochs nearby hold brown trout.
Finlaggan itself is a mile north, and it is not a small thing. This was the seat of the Lords of the Isles, the Norse-Gaelic rulers of the Hebrides for three hundred years, until the Scottish Crown forfeited the last lord and destroyed the site in 1493. New lords were inaugurated standing on a stone with a footprint cut into it, placing a foot in the print to signify they would walk where their ancestors had walked.
The village is older than the coast. Its name comes from Baill a Ghrana, the town of the grain, and it grew on good arable land while the distillery villages down at the shore came later. Lead and silver were mined here from the seventeenth century; Welsh families with names like Finnie, Edwards and Griffiths came for the work and filled sixteen houses in Miners' Row, since quietly converted into homes.
Kilmeny church, just west, was sold to the local community group in 2025 to keep it in use. The 450 bus runs the island spine past the village most of the day, but not on Sundays, so getting to church, or anywhere, is easier the rest of the week.
Inside the church there is a bronze war memorial of a dying soldier comforted by an angel, and an electric organ the Caol Ila distillery gave for its 125th birthday.
