A short coastal path runs the length of Port Wemyss, from one end of the village to the other, past an old harbour and pier. It's called Ràthas nan Lasgairean, the Path of the Fisherman, and it was built and is kept up by the people who live here, on donations. There's an information sign halfway along and parking at the east end. islay.scot calls the old harbour "one of the nicest spots on Islay to watch a sunset."
The village is a line of white-washed cottages and terraced houses on the shore, gardens well tended, looking across a narrow channel to Orsay — a small tidal island with a lighthouse on it. The water in between is treacherous and notorious for shipwrecks. Grey seals haul out on Orsay below the light. From the path you might also see otters, the occasional bottlenose dolphin working the tidal currents, and a great many sea birds.
Port Wemyss has no pub. It never had a church, or a shop. For all three you walk a few hundred yards north to Portnahaven, which is close enough that the two villages are effectively one, divided only by a burn near Burnside Lodge. Portnahaven has the Spar and post office, opposite the beach.
Until recently it also had An Tigh Seinnse — Gaelic for "the house of singing" — said to be the last remaining pub in this part of Islay. It closed in early 2026, which leaves both villages without one.
The church the two share sits in Portnahaven and was finished in 1828, a Parliamentary church built with government money to serve remote Highland parishes and designed by Thomas Telford. It has two doors on the south front. By tradition one was for Portnahaven residents and the other for Port Wemyss, a division that reflected a rivalry between the villages said to cause friction at weddings.
Wednesday mornings there's coffee and cake in the church — "T in the Church" — which is one way the arrangement holds together.
The lighthouse across the water is older than the village. Robert Stevenson built it on Orsay in 1825, a rubble tower about 29 metres tall, and it was manned until 1998; the keepers latterly came and went by helicopter from Oban. Port Wemyss arrived seven years later, in 1832, founded by Walter Frederick Campbell to rehouse people cleared from inland Islay and retrain them as fishermen. He named it after his father-in-law, the 8th Earl of Wemyss. The fish caught here was cured and traded to Ireland, which is where most of the village's goods came back from.
For a fishing village it sits oddly far back from the water, up above the shore — the fertile ground by the sea was kept for crofts.
Getting here is seven miles of single-track road from Port Charlotte, at the far south-western corner of the island. The 450 bus runs from the village out through Bowmore to Port Ellen, about seventy-five minutes to Bowmore. There is no railway on Islay; the nearest is a ferry and a long drive away on the mainland.
The seals, for their part, are curious, and — islay.scot again — "often observe the observers."
