Port Askaig

The inn beneath the brae

The Port Bar, in the Port Askaig Hotel, keeps an extensive selection of Islay malts and a display of old and rare bottles, and is the oldest licensed premises on the island. It is also the bar of a place that has held an inn for over four hundred years. "There has been an Inn at Port Askaig for over 400 years," the hotel says. "It would have been established in those days as a resting place for drovers taking livestock to market on the mainland."

The village itself is smaller than the sentence that describes it. It sits on a narrow shelf at the foot of a steep, wooded hillside on Islay's north-east coast, on the eastern shore of the Sound of Islay, with Jura half a mile across the water and the Paps rising behind it. Arriving on foot means a sharp climb up the brae away from the pier.

Harbour tables and working ferries

The hotel has been in one family for over fifty years. Its Starboard Restaurant does catch of the day fresh from the harbour, and the steak and Islay Ale pie is one of its biggest sellers. Bar mains start around £6.95; the restaurant menu runs dearer. There is a beer garden overlooking the harbour, which is where you would sit to watch the ferries work.

And they do work. The Sound is a narrow tidal channel with strong currents, and the Jura ferry crosses it to Feolin in five minutes, roughly every half hour to an hour through the day. CalMac's larger boat runs to Kennacraig on the mainland; there is no railway on Islay, and no station.

Provisions and the north road

Port Askaig Stores is a general shop and petrol station beside the port, the fuelling and provisioning point for the north end of the island. The harbour lands crab, lobster and langoustines from the local boats. A little inland, Persabus Pottery paints its own work by hand and takes guests.

The single-track road north climbs above the Sound past Ardnahoe Distillery and its café to Bunnahabhain, about three and a half miles on, a remote Victorian distillery with the Paps of Jura filling the view. Caol Ila, Islay's largest producer, sits a mile and a half up the coast; much of what it makes goes quietly into Johnnie Walker. Inland, the Lily Loch trail runs through old lead-mining woodland.

Lifeboats and a changing harbour

On the pier the RNLI station is open to visitors. Its all-weather boat, the Helmut Schroder of Dunlossit II, is named for the family up at Dunlossit House, who paid for roughly half of it, and is called out ten to twelve times a year.

Before roll-on, roll-off ferries arrived in the 1960s, cars were driven onto a net and swung by crane into the mail boat's hold. Between 2002 and 2011 the hillside behind the village was quarried away for queuing lanes and a new road.

Leaving Port Askaig

Port Askaig has its own pipe march, "Leaving Port Askaig," composed in 1926 by Pipe Major Willie Ross. He wrote it after sailing out of the harbour on the paddle steamer Pioneer in a rough sea, and the lilt of the tune is said to be a boat rising and falling in the swell.