Largs

Ice cream and the Clyde

Nardini's makes 32 flavours of ice cream on the premises, with gelato chefs working through the day, and it sells them from an Art Deco building on the Esplanade that has been standing since 1935. The café reopened in December 2008 after a refurbishment that cost several million pounds. Inside there are 200 seats, panoramic windows onto the Firth of Clyde, an Italian bakery turning out pastries each morning, and a piano player at weekends. It also does award-winning fish and chips. Daniela Nardini, the actress, was born here in 1968.

That gives you a sense of the place. Largs sits on a narrow coastal shelf below hills on the North Ayrshire coast, sheltering behind the northern tip of Great Cumbrae. The name comes from the Gaelic "Learg," meaning hillside, and the hills — Knock Hill, Brisbane Glen — rise steeply behind the town while the Gogo Water runs through the middle of it. In front is a pebble beach, a promenade, a marina full of sailing boats, and wide water leading across to Cumbrae, Bute and the Arran hills.

Steamers, shorelines and the battle

The seafront pub is The Paddle Steamer, a Wetherspoon on Gallowgate Street with a licensed beer garden and breakfast from eight in the morning. It is named after the PS Waverley, the last sea-going paddle steamer in the world, which still calls at Largs pier in summer. The pier itself dates from 1834, back when a fleet of Clyde steamers called here.

For walking, the easiest is The Pencil, a mile or so south along the shore past the marina to a 70-foot cone of whinstone blocks. It marks the site of the Battle of Largs, fought on 2 October 1263, when a storm wrecked and grounded ships from King Haakon's Norwegian fleet and the Norse withdrew after fighting on the beach. Haakon retreated to Orkney and died there that December. The monument went up in 1912 and cost about £300. Longer legs can take the CalMac ferry across to Great Cumbrae, where a flat eleven-mile road loops the island to Millport and back, past bike hire and a tiny cathedral.

The legend in Brisbane Glen

The stranger walk is up Brisbane Glen to the Prophet's Grave, where the Reverend William Smith was buried in 1647 after tending his plague-stricken parishioners. Two trees were planted at either end of the grave, and local legend has it that so long as they never touch, the plague will not return to Largs.

Rails and the coastal road

Trains run hourly from the town-centre station to Glasgow Central, Sundays included, on a line that opened in 1885 and turned a small fishing and kirk settlement into a Victorian holiday resort. The A78 brings you in along the coast from Greenock to the north or Ardrossan to the south.

Fireworks and last light

The Viking Festival usually closes out late summer with a longship burned and fireworks over the Clyde. On an ordinary evening, though, it is enough to sit on the front with a Nardini's cone and watch the light go down behind Cumbrae.