The passenger ferry to Lismore leaves from the village jetty, a ten-minute crossing you turn up for rather than book. Dogs travel free, bikes need a ticket, and you're asked to arrive twenty minutes early, which for a boat you don't reserve is a particular kind of instruction. Undiscovered Scotland calls it "the shortest and cheapest ferry crossing to Lismore," and at £2.55 single it is hard to argue.
On the pier itself is the Pierhouse Hotel, whose Ferry Bar occupies what was once the covered area where goods were loaded onto trolleys before being rolled out to the steamboats. The building started life in the 19th century as the Pier Master's private residence, built to service the Loch Linnhe steamers running between Oban and Fort William. It got its liquor licence around the 1990s. The Ferry Bar now keeps a wood-burning stove and over ninety malts, and dogs are allowed here and in the Lismore Dining Room but not the main restaurant.
The seafood is landed close by: oysters from Loch Creran, mussels and langoustines from Loch Linnhe and Loch Etive, crab and lobster from local waters. It was named National Restaurant of the Year at the Hotels of the Year Scotland Awards for 2023-24, holds two AA rosettes, and is one of only three Argyll restaurants in the 2025 Michelin Guide. You can also just have tea and a scone and watch the ferry come and go.
A short way inland, the Airds Hotel does the more formal version of the same idea — an 18th-century ferry inn, now a fine-dining restaurant with rooms, three AA rosettes, and a seven-course seafood tasting menu alongside dishes like Isle of Mull crab roulade and seared Argyll venison. One reviewer described the staff as "tremendous" and said they "seem to appear just when you need them."
The village shop is Port Appin Stores, a community co-op since 1984 and holder of the Post Office. Bread, rolls and savoury pies arrive daily from the Argyll Bakery, there's local venison, a fish van parked outside on Tuesday mornings, and milk and ice cream brought over from the Isle of Gigha. The Post Office shuts for lunch, one till two, every day.
Walk out past the village and the coast path takes you around the headland to Clach Tholl, "the rock with a hole in it," a limestone arch left stranded by a sea that used to be higher, with Lismore and Mull across the water.
The thing everyone photographs is a mile and a half up the coast: Castle Stalker, a four-storey tower house on a tidal islet, built by the Stewarts in the 15th century. James IV is thought to have stayed often for the hunting. The Campbells got it around 1620 through a drunken wager and let the roof go by 1840; a Stewart bought it back in 1908, another Stewart family completed a full restoration from 1965, and their children and grandchildren still run it. It is also, from across the water, the "Castle of Aaargh" in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
There is no railway — the line to Oban closed decades ago and is now the cycle track. Oban is about thirty-five minutes by car, off the A828. From the jetty, mostly, you watch the boat.
