Port Charlotte

Seafood and music at the Port Charlotte Hotel

The Port Charlotte Hotel fronts Main Street and backs onto the beach, which means you can eat scallops and then walk out onto the sand without crossing a road. The seafood comes off the Islay fishing fleet: lobster, oysters, crab, langoustines, prawns, and the platters are what the house is known for. Beef, venison and lamb come from Argyll farms via the butcher Archie Ferguson, and the game runs to woodcock and red partridge. A TripAdvisor reviewer called it "Definitely the best restaurant in Islay," which is a large claim for a village this size.

The bar has a carved wooden counter and a lot of Islay and Jura whisky behind it. It won National Whisky Pub of the Year in 2009. On Wednesday and Sunday evenings through the summer there are traditional music sessions — Gaelic singing, fiddles, pipes, accordions — and reviewers report the ceilidh nights get very crowded, which in a ten-room hotel is easy to imagine.

The Lochindaal Hotel and village provisions

Further along is the Lochindaal Hotel, owned by the MacLellan family for over a hundred years. Iain and Katie MacLellan run it now, with five children. The public bar has a pool table, a dartboard and dogs; the lounge bar has a log burner. Its sister restaurant, the Lochindaal Seafood Kitchen opposite the Islay Museum, does platters and scones from April to October. It has been renamed twice, first Yan's Kitchen, before that the Croft Kitchen.

The village is a strip of white-painted houses along Loch Indaal. Main Street is split-level: houses on one side raised above the road, shore-side buildings set below, with back closes reached through archways. Across the water are the hills of Jura. Provisioning is done at the Spar, which also has the petrol station and the post office.

A planned distillery village

Port Charlotte was built to a plan. Walter Frederick Campbell, Laird of Islay, founded it in 1828 and named it for his mother, Lady Charlotte. It existed mainly to house the workers of the Lochindaal Distillery, which at its 1880s peak made 120,000 gallons a year. The distillery closed in 1929, and its warehouses now hold the youth hostel, the nature centre, and Bruichladdich's maturing casks up the shore.

The whisky writer Alfred Barnard came in 1886 and called it "a village of little importance and interest except for the large distillery." The distillery is now gone. The village stayed.

Museum, nature centre and shore walks

The Islay Natural History Trust runs a nature centre on Main Street in another former warehouse, with aquariums and staff who will tell you where to find otters, eagles and orchids. The Museum of Islay Life, in an old church, reopened in June 2025 after reconstruction; its holdings include an illicit still and the clockworks from the Rhinns lighthouse.

The Loch Indaal Way follows the shore to Bruichladdich, a little over a mile, looking across to the Paps of Jura. Northward you can walk to the white 1869 lighthouse on its headland. From the stone pier people fish for mackerel and watch for porpoises. The A847 runs through on the loch shore; the island itself is reached by CalMac ferry from Kennacraig.

The Tooth Stone

In a glen nearby there is a Tooth Stone, said to cure toothache if you drove a nail into it. A local, remembering earlier times, said folk once "were chatting on every street corner."