Kilmore

Smokehouse and scattered village

At Kilmore House in Cleigh, the family-run Feochan Mhor Smokehouse cures fish the way it has long been done in Scotland. The Feochan Mhor Smokehouse smokes pâté, shellfish and fish drawn from Oban's waters and its own trout farm, and Willie, who has been in the fish trade for years, still goes down to the harbour himself to buy from fishermen he knows. It is one of only two smokehouses around Oban, the other being Inverawe over at Taynuilt.

That is more or less the commerce of Kilmore. There is no pub. The village is scattered rather than gathered, strung along Glen Feochan with a village hall, the smokehouse, and not much else that sells you anything. For a drink or a proper meal you go into Oban, four miles up the road, or out to one of the country inns towards Loch Awe.

Between two lochs

The glen is the reason to be here. It runs for about three kilometres between two lochs — freshwater Loch Nell to the north-east, the sea loch Loch Feochan to the south-west — through wooded, hill-flanked country with otters, pine marten and red squirrel in it. You can take a rowing boat out on Loch Nell. The valley floor between the lochs holds at least ten prehistoric cairns, which is a lot of cairns for three kilometres.

The strangest of them is the Loch Nell Serpent Mound: an S-shaped earthwork some 300 feet long, running from a chambered cairn down toward the water. In the 1870s an antiquarian named John Phené excavated it and declared it "clearly a relic of serpent worship." A visitor in 1883 saw its spine as "large stones, set like the vertebrae of some huge animal." A sceptical historian in 1879 found "not even a faint reason" for any of it. A 1970 dig settled less than you'd hope: Neolithic pottery, flint, cremated bone, and some charred hazelnuts.

A ruin made romantic

A short walk off the glen road brings you to the old Kilmore church, roofless on the shore of Loch Feochan, ivy-clad and spread with lichen among medieval graveslabs whose inscriptions have worn away. It looks the way it does partly on purpose. In 1876 the roof and part of the east gable were dismantled deliberately, to make the ruin look more romantic, in keeping with the Victorian taste for that sort of thing.

Lives remembered at Kilmore

Inside is a large late-medieval tomb recess, and in the west wall a monument to James Campbell, the minister who died in 1756. Colin Campbell of Glenfeochan, killed at the Battle of Inverlochy in 1645, lies somewhere in the churchyard in an unmarked grave. The last person buried here was William Henry White, a Canadian soldier who died in February 1919, aged nineteen.

The road back to Oban

Oban station, four miles off, is the end of the West Highland Line from Glasgow. The 418 bus runs through on its way to the isles, stopping at the village hall — about nine minutes into town, if the smokehouse hasn't sold out.