The Kerrera Tea Garden sits in a walled garden at Lower Gylen, a few minutes from a ruined castle, and serves Lorne sausage stovies, carrot cake and cold fizzy rhubarb juice in what one visitor called cute, kitsch crockery. Aideen and Martin took it over in 2013 and run it with their daughter Nancy from April to the end of September, Thursday to Monday, eleven till four. There is a bothy to shelter in when the weather turns and a lavatory signposted the Loo with a View. One blogger's lunch of juice, stovies, tea and cake came to £12.55, which for a place reached only by boat is not bad going.
Kerrera is a long, narrow island lying immediately off Oban, seven kilometres by two, cut off from the mainland by a sound about five hundred metres wide. There are no public roads for visitors' cars, and no cars to speak of beyond the residents' own, which leaves it a walking and cycling island by default.
You reach it on the CalMac passenger ferry Carvoria from Gallanach, a five-to-ten-minute crossing carrying feet and bikes only, about £3.70 return, with the last boat off around five to six. A pre-booked water taxi from Oban's North Pier lands you at Kerrera Marina at the north end.
The marina is where you'll find the Waypoint Bar & Grill, the island's other place to eat. The menu changes daily around whatever's freshest — scallops, hake, mussels, mackerel pâté, venison burgers, fish and chips — and the tables look west over the water at the sunset. Lunch Thursday to Sunday, dinner most evenings.
Two farm shops sell what the island raises. Ardantrive Farm Shop, at the north end, doubles as a gallery; Balliemore Farm Shop is family-run. Both trade in their own beef, pork and lamb.
The main walk is a six-mile circle from the ferry slip in the middle of the island, heading south along the Sound of Kerrera to Gylen Castle and the tea garden, the track giving views out to Mull, Jura, Colonsay and the Garvellachs. It follows the old drove road, along which island cattle were once walked the length of Kerrera before being swum across to the mainland at a place called Cow Point. The elevated interior is called Am Maolan, the Wild Place — "and wild it is," according to one walker.
Gylen Castle, an L-plan tower house on a promontory over the Firth of Lorn, was built by Duncan MacDougall in 1582 and burned by Covenanters in 1647, when the garrison surrendered and were massacred, all but the infant chief. The Brooch of Lorn, torn from Robert the Bruce at Dalrigh in 1306, was kept there, looted in the sack, lost for a century and a half, and returned to the MacDougalls in 1824. Ravens nest in the ruins now. Turner came and sketched it in 1831. Earlier still, in 1249, King Alexander II died of a fever at Horseshoe Bay; the field where he came ashore is still called Dail Righ, the King's Field.
The population has crept back up — sixty-eight by 2019, eighteen of them children. The island's own history page notes that where Vikings once plundered, the only threat to walkers today is the feral island children attacking the unsuspecting with a nerf gun.
