At the head of Main Street, closing off the view uphill from the pier, there is a church with no corners. Kilarrow Parish Church is round. The story attached to it is that it was built this way so the Devil would have nowhere to hide, and while that is not the sort of thing you can verify, it is the sort of thing that gets repeated for two and a half centuries. Inside, the roof's eight radial beams all rest on a single central pillar, nineteen inches across, harled and plastered over so you cannot see what it is made of. Local belief holds that underneath the plaster is a ship's mast. It is the only complete circular church in Scotland, sixty feet in diameter, and it sits exactly where a planned village puts its most important building: at the top of the hill, where the whole grid runs up to meet it.
You will notice the grid before you notice much else. Bowmore was laid out from 1768 on a plan, wide streets ascending in straight lines from the loch, and the effect is that the village is legible in a way most Scottish villages are not. You can stand at the pier and see where you are going. Main Street climbs roughly three hundred metres from the harbour to the church, and this is the classic walk through the place — up the spine, past the shops, to the round church at the top. It takes a few minutes. It is worth doing slowly.
Down at the water, the working part of the village asserts itself. The Bowmore Distillery's No. 1 warehouse stands whitewashed at the very edge of the loch, and it is not there for the view. This is the No. 1 Vaults, the oldest whisky maturation warehouse still in use in Scotland and the only part of the distillery left from the original 1779 building. It sits below sea level, which gives the casks a damp, cool climate that the distillery will tell you at length is the point of the whole thing. The distillery shop in the village sells the single malt range at source, and during Fèis Ìle the Vaults are sometimes opened for tastings that are gone the moment they are announced.
Between the pier and the distillery there is a small sandy beach. Across Loch Indaal, the broad sea loch that nearly cuts the island in two, lie the Rhinns of Islay. This is a good stretch for standing and looking, and a good stretch for birds — the Islay coasts carry fulmars, razorbills and kittiwakes, and the loch shore rewards anyone who brings binoculars and a bit of patience.
For eating, the village punches above a population of around 710. The Lochside Hotel on Shore Street has been at it since 1884 and describes itself, not unreasonably, as an Islay institution. Its bar holds one of the widest whisky selections on the island, which on Islay is a genuine claim, and its kitchen leans hard on what comes out of the water: Islay scallops, crab, langoustines, mussels, alongside prime sirloin steaks and fish and chips. There is an outdoor terrace overlooking the harbour, which on the right evening is the best seat in Bowmore.
Round on The Square, by the harbour, is the Harbour Inn, an award-winning seafood restaurant with rooms that happens to be owned by the distillery. The menu changes with the season and runs to oysters, scallops and langoustines, with whiskies from across the island's distilleries to go with them. Reviews praise the seafood and the views and call the staff friendly, attentive and knowledgeable; the one recurring note is that the prices sit on the higher side. If you want Islay produce without the price tag, the Bowmore Hotel on Jamieson Street makes excellent use of the island's beef, lamb and seafood in a more traditional dining room.
Then there is Peatzeria, on Shore Street, a wood-oven pizzeria on the loch. The pizzas run from margherita and pepperoni up to Islay lobster and scallop toppings, which is a sentence that only makes sense somewhere the lobster is landed a few miles away. It does non-pizza dishes too, but the lobster pizza is the reason people mention it.
Bowmore is the shopping village for the whole island, which is to say it has the most of everything. Supermarkets, two banks, a garage and petrol station, the council offices, a community hall. On an island this is not a small thing; if something is going to be bought on Islay, there is a decent chance it is bought here. The Ìleach, the fortnightly community newspaper named UK Community Newspaper of the Year in 2006, is sold in almost every supermarket on the island, which tells you both about the paper and about how many supermarkets there are to sell it in.
The village looks after itself in other ways too. The MacTaggart Leisure Centre on School Street opened in 1991 inside a former distillery bonded warehouse that the distillery gave to the community; the million-pound conversion was funded by the community itself, and it was named after Sir John Mactaggart, a major donor. It has a four-lane, twenty-five-metre swimming pool, and the pool is heated by waste heat piped underground from the neighbouring distillery. This is the kind of arrangement that only happens in a place built around one industry, and it is exactly as sensible as it sounds. The Columba Centre, Ionad Chaluim Chille Ìle, is a Gaelic college and community centre with a café, converted in 2002 from the former hospital. Even the high school gets in on it: the building is topped with a decorative pagoda, echoing the shape of a distillery roof.
The history here is unusually clean, because most of it was decided at once. In 1768 Daniel Campbell the Younger of Shawfield cleared the old settlement of Kilarrow, near Islay House, so its grounds could be landscaped, and moved the population down to a new grid-plan town on the loch. It is reputed to be the first planned village in Scotland. The round church went up over 1767 to 1769, built for the Campbell family at a cost of around a thousand pounds, and a popular theory hands the design to John Adam, of the Adam architectural family. The distillery was formally established in 1779, making it Islay's oldest and Scotland's second-oldest legal distillery; the founding is recorded under the name David Simson, with the Glaswegian twin brothers William and James Mutter attached to its early ownership.
By 1793 there were 110 houses — fifty with slate roofs, twenty tiled, the rest thatched — and small fields left between the rows of houses so each family could grow food and keep a milking cow. Those fields have all been built over now. The village kept growing anyway. By the 1850s it was being called the metropolis of Islay, and its population reached around 850 by 1891. Some of that momentum still shows: the grid is fully occupied, the shops are still shops, and the paper still comes out every fortnight.
Two odder chapters deserve a mention. In May 1685, nearby Kilarrow saw the first stages of Argyll's Rising, when rebels under the Earl of Argyll landed from the Netherlands in a failed attempt to unseat King James VII and II. And during the Second World War, RAF Bowmore ran a flying-boat base on Loch Indaal, using the harbour for its seaplanes; the base appears in the wartime film Coastal Command. It is long gone now, but it is why the loch has that slightly too-large, too-open feel for a village harbour. Islay was not connected to the National Grid until 1962, by undersea cable, which puts the underground distillery heating in the leisure centre in some perspective.
Bowmore has produced its share of people. William Livingstone, Uilleam MacDhunLèibhe, the Scottish Gaelic poet and chronicler of the Highland Clearances, was born here in 1808. Donald Caskie, the wartime rescuer known as the Tartan Pimpernel, was born on the island, which also claims the actor Vivian MacKerrell, said to have been the inspiration for the character Withnail — a fact that improves any village it lands in.
Getting here takes commitment, and the village is honest about it. Islay has no railway. The A846 runs through Bowmore linking Port Ellen to the south with Port Askaig to the north-east, and the village is the island's road hub; buses run from here to Port Ellen, Port Askaig, Portnahaven and the airport. Most people arrive by the CalMac ferry from Kennacraig on the mainland — around two hours and twenty minutes to Port Ellen, or two hours to Port Askaig, both a short drive away. There is also Islay Airport at Glenegedale, a few miles south, with daily flights to Glasgow. However you come, you will spend a while getting here, and this is part of the deal.
Once you have arrived, the island opens up. Port Askaig, eleven miles north-east, looks across the Sound of Islay to Jura. Port Ellen, eleven miles south, is the gateway to the distillery coast, where Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Ardbeg line the shore near the old Kildalton Cross. North of Bowmore, the Loch Gruinart RSPB reserve fills every winter with barnacle and Greenland white-fronted geese in numbers that are hard to describe and easy to hear. But Bowmore itself is the place to base yourself: the shops, the pool warmed by whisky, the round church at the top of the hill, and the terrace at the Lochside where you can sit with an island malt and watch the light go down over the Rhinns. Late in May, when Fèis Ìle fills the village, you will not get a table anywhere. The rest of the year you will, and the langoustines will still be local.
