A pane in the dining-room window of the Harris Hotel carries J.M. Barrie's signature, scratched into the glass in 1912 and still there. The hotel was built in 1865 by the 7th Earl of Dunmore as a sporting retreat for anglers, and the same family has run it since the early 1900s. It remains what it has long been: a base for anglers, photographers, birdwatchers and geologists, who come for the food and the quiet of the place and tend to come back.
Tarbert sits on a neck of land barely wide enough to hold it, with West Loch Tarbert on one side and East Loch Tarbert on the other. The Gaelic name means an isthmus or portage — the crossing point where boats were once hauled overland to save the long sail around the Sound of Harris. Stand in the right spot and you can see both sea lochs at once. Behind the village rise the rocky mountains of North Harris, with Clisham on the skyline: at 799 metres the highest mountain in the Outer Hebrides and the only Corbett in the archipelago. The usual ascent starts from a car park at a bridge on the A859 towards Stornoway, across ground that is boggy underfoot and often wet overhead.
The Isle of Harris Distillery keeps a peat fire burning in its hearth for anyone who walks in, which is part of the point. It was built in 2015 as a "social distillery" — the founders' word — meant to create year-round work and slow the loss of people from the island. It makes The Hearach, Harris's first single malt, released in autumn 2023, and a gin drawn from nine botanicals, one of them sugar kelp seaweed hand-harvested in the Hebrides. The gin took gold at the World Gin Awards in 2021. By 2017 the distillery had welcomed more than 144,000 visitors, which for a village of around 500 people is a great many.
The Harris Tweed shop sells cloth woven on the island, every length stamped with the Orb trademark the Harris Tweed Association registered in 1909. A tweed mill was established here around 1900, one of the trades that made Tarbert the main settlement of Harris by 1894.
The Caledonian MacBrayne ferry to Uig on Skye leaves from the terminal in the village itself, beside the car park and the seasonal tourist information centre. There is no railway anywhere in the Outer Hebrides; the A859 runs the length of Harris and Lewis, and the island buses run with it. Drive twenty-odd minutes southwest and you reach Luskentyre, a beach of white shell sand with the island of Taransay offshore.
Tarbert was only founded in 1779, as a fishing settlement, which makes it young for a place with this much behind it. Just to the northwest, at Bunabhainneadar, the ruined slipway and chimney of a whaling station still stand; it worked on and off until 1952 and then stopped.
The peat fire is usually still going when the last ferry has gone.