The village shop is pink, and calls itself the World Famous Pink Shop. In October 2017 a bluegrass five-string banjo tune called "The Famous Pink Shop" was first aired at the Bookends Festival, though the shop had been painted long before the tune existed. There is also a garage and a caravan and leisure store, the last of which tells you how Benderloch grew: around the holiday trade at Tralee Bay.
There is no pub. Benderloch has two places to eat instead, and for actual pubs you drive the fifteen minutes to Oban or the two miles to Connel.
The Hawthorn sits at Keil Crofts, four hundred yards off the main road on twenty acres of croft land, five minutes from the beach. It is a family-run restaurant rather than a pub, and the menu is straight country cooking: haddock they call angel haddock, black pudding bon bons, a Cajun chicken burger, steak pie, and puddings of apple crumble, chocolate cake and sticky toffee. It rates 4.6 from around four hundred reviews, one titled "One of the best in Scotland." The portions are reportedly enormous.
The Ben Lora Cafe is the daytime option, and also a second-hand bookshop. Towards the back is a large selection of books, so you can browse while the soup is made. There is pizza, ham sandwiches, raspberry scones, home bakes and ice cream, a meal running anywhere from a pound to ten. One reviewer calls it "very dog friendly, at least in the outside seating area."
The hill above the village is Beinn Lora, 308 metres, partly forested. Waymarked Forestry and Land Scotland trails start from a car park at the southern edge of the village, and the round trip to the trig point takes two to two and a half hours, with a boggy patch before the final pull. Walkhighlands notes that "Beinn Lora may only be 308 metres high but its position means that the magnificent views from its summit match those from many a Munro" — Loch Etive to Ben Cruachan, and Seil, Kerrera, Mull and Lismore laid out beyond. A path off the route reaches the Eagle's Eyrie, a viewpoint on a steep slope with an aerial view straight down over the village.
Below all this is Tralee Beach, a sandy bay curving round the head of Ardmucknish Bay, the best family beach in the area.
The name comes from the Gaelic Beinn eadar dà loch, the mountain between two lochs. The village is younger than it looks: it grew up as a railway settlement in the 1900s, marked on early Ordnance Survey maps as New Selma. Its own station opened in 1903 and closed in 1966. The A828 runs through it now, on the way from Oban to Fort William, and the 405 bus terminates a little further on at Lochnell School.
The older story is up the shore at Ardchattan Priory, founded around 1230 for Valliscaulian monks, who kept a rule of silence punctuated seven times a day by prayer. There were never more than thirty of them, sometimes as few as three. In 1308 Robert the Bruce summoned a council of chiefs here, held to be the last Scottish parliament conducted in Gaelic. The ruins sit beside a working farm, and the garden is open to visitors.
