Applecross

The Inn at the Water's Edge

The Applecross Inn stands on Shore Street with its back to the whitewashed terrace and its front to the water, looking across the Inner Sound to Raasay, Skye and the Cuillin. In colder months a peat stove burns in the small dining room. Judith Fish has run the place since 1989, with her sister Carolyn, and in the 2019 New Year Honours she was made MBE for services to Highland tourism and the local community. The Inn has a reputation out of all proportion to the length of the single-track road that reaches it.

The kitchen leans on what comes out of the water in front of it: Applecross Bay prawns in hot garlic butter, hand-dived king scallops with crispy bacon on pea purée, local oysters served au naturel with lemon and mignonette, haddock and monkfish in Applecross beer batter. Smoked salmon comes roast-flaked, cold-smoked, or both. There is crab and mango in lightly curried mayonnaise on chive-oil potatoes, and haggis flambéed in Drambuie for anyone who wants the land instead of the sea. Puddings run to Scottish raspberry cranachan with homemade almond praline, sticky toffee, and Applecross ice cream. Three changing cask ales usually include something from the Applecross Brewing Company, whose Pale Ale is among them, alongside Scottish malt whiskies and gins. Well-behaved dogs come in on leads, and the beer garden is across the road on the seaward side, with a few covered tables for the days the weather does not cooperate.

The retro-styled counter across from the bar is Inn-Side Out, which the Inn added in 2014 for takeaway and overflow. It does the Inn's fish and chips, locally made sausage rolls and pasties, prawn and crab salads when there are prawns and crab, freshly ground coffee, home-baked traybakes, and Aron's Applecross Ices. It runs seasonally and its opening depends on the weather, so it is worth checking ahead before a special trip.

Garden, Shops and Peninsula Produce

Inland, behind high stone walls at Applecross House, is the Walled Garden and its Potting Shed café and restaurant. Jon and Elaine Glover took it on in 2001, when the garden had been derelict since the 1970s — a tractor had gone through one of the walls — and restored it over the following year. It had once been worked by six gardeners. Now the fruit and vegetables on the plate are grown a few feet from the table, lamb and wild boar come from Toscaig down the peninsula, and estate venison is butchered on site. Jon also crews a local fishing boat and brings in prawns, squat lobsters, crab and the occasional octopus. The garden's own phrase for what it does is "garden and sea to table," and the Michelin Guide recommends it. The walls are high enough that children can wander the beds while the adults eat.

The Village Shop on the shore is the general store for the whole peninsula: fruit and vegetables, groceries, chilled and frozen food, beer, wine and spirits, newspapers, postcards, camping gas, firewood and peat, and it will order in what it does not stock. Postal services are worth checking on arrival, since the Post Office's own records now put the Applecross branch at Carn Raineach in Camustiel rather than on Shore Street, even though local habit still speaks of shop and post office as one.

At the foot of the Bealach, the Coalshed is a small gallery of handmade jewellery, art and craft, some of it by the designer Sue Groocock. The Trust renovated the building in 2012; before that it had been precisely what it is called, storing coal landed from coastal puffers at the pier in the days before roads reached this far. Along the bay, Applecross Interiors and Gifts is the shop and studio of Tery McCowan, who prints homewares and garments in colours drawn from the hills and runs workshops through the season. The Potting Shed by the garden sells work by local artists, Scottish cookery and travel books, and the practical things a self-caterer always forgets. At Kenmore on the north road, the Applecross Smokehouse cures salmon, sea trout, shellfish, kippers and smoked cheeses, though its shop is closed for the time being.

Sanctuary and Earlier Lives

A short walk inland at Clachan, the old parish church sits inside an oval enclosure holding cist graves and early burials, older than the church built within it. The church itself was built between 1816 and 1818, a plain harled rectangle with bare stone walls and an original canopied pulpit, fluted, with the precentor's seat below it. It is no longer used for Sunday worship — the Trust owns it now, and it holds weddings, memorial services, concerts and exhibitions — but the ground beneath it is the reason Applecross exists at all. In AD 673 the monk Máel Ruba arrived from Bangor and founded a monastery on this spot. The Gaelic name for the place, A' Chomraich, means "the Sanctuary," and the protection it once offered reached six miles in every direction from the church. Historic Environment Scotland rates the buried monastic settlement as comparable to Iona for understanding the early Church in Scotland. Near the entrance, a cross-slab a little over two and a half metres tall carries the worn outline of a ringed cross; tradition ties it to an early abbot, though the connection cannot be proved. A small roofless chapel nearby later served as a family burial vault.

The name, for what it is worth, has nothing to do with apples. The older form Aporcrosan is related to the mouth of the Crossan, the river that still divides the bay into two sweeps of sand and runs past a crescent of stone that was once a fish trap.

The peninsula was occupied long before any monastery. At Sand, a few miles north, excavation of a rockshelter turned up a midden of limpets, fish and animal bone, along with stone tools and shell beads left by hunter-fisher-gatherers who were here more than eight thousand years ago. Nearer the campsite there is a broch and a scatter of hut circles; Time Team came to dig in 2005. The Mackenzies took control in the sixteenth century, among them Iain Molach — "Hairy John" — whose generosity and command of family genealogy became proverbial. An Irish harper is remembered judging that John's right hand was best at tracing pedigrees and his left at giving away what he owned. In 1715 Applecross men marched with their laird to Sheriffmuir; the estate was forfeited and he fled to France, and his son bought it back nine years later for £3,777.

Roads, Townships and Paths

For most of its history the only way in ended at Applecross Bay, where MacBrayne's Kyle-to-Stornoway mailboat put passengers ashore by rowing boat at Milton. The estate cut the road over Bealach na Bà in 1825 and 1826, and it was not tarred until the 1950s; the coast road round the north shore arrived only in the mid-1970s; the Inn's own history dates its ceremonial opening by Princess Margaret to 1976. In the 1891 census ninety-five per cent of the parish spoke Gaelic, and in Camusterrach and Culduie more than half spoke nothing else.

It helps to know that Applecross is not really a village so much as a scattered community of more than twenty crofting townships — Ardheslaig, Kenmore, Cuaig, Milton, Camusteel, Camusterrach, Culduie, Toscaig and the rest — spread across some 26,000 hectares between Loch Torridon and Loch Kishorn, with around two hundred permanent residents. In summer the numbers passing through can be three times that. The two ways in shape everything. The Bealach na Bà climbs eighteen kilometres of hairpins and steep gradient to a high, bare summit before dropping to the bay; Highland Council advises learners, caravans and motorhomes to take the longer coast road from Shieldaig instead, and the pass closes altogether in bad weather — it was shut for the first fortnight of January 2026 under snow. Strathcarron, the nearest railway station, is twenty-three miles away by road and has neither a ticket machine nor toilets, so most people arrive having arranged the last leg in advance. There is a community-owned filling station at the foot of the Bealach, which since 2008 has sold the peninsula its petrol and diesel and takes a card.

The walking is the other reason to come. The Trust keeps up more than forty kilometres of paths, from a gentle River Walk between two bridges to the two-kilometre Keppoch Track past a disused limekiln. A 4.1-kilometre circuit links the House, the Walled Garden, the River Crossan and the seafront in an easy afternoon; the Milltown loop passes the broch, a reconstructed roundhouse and the estate's ventilated Hebridean barns, built so hay and grain could dry in the wind. Longer days reach the pale beaches at Ard-Ban — the "coral" there is really maerl, a pink calcified seaweed — or the exposed ridge of Sgùrr a' Chaorachain above the pass, where Chris Bonington and Tom Patey made the first ascent of the A' Chioch ridge in 1960. Off the paths you might spot otters along the shore, seals and dolphins offshore, golden eagles over Beinn Bhàn, and brown trout in the hill lochs.

Community Life and Highland Traditions

For families, Sand is a broad sandy beach backed by dunes and good for shells and rock pools, and there is a play park opposite the primary school. The Community Hall is the indoor heart of the place, running everything from playgroups to plays to "strupags," the Gaelic tea-and-talk gatherings. At the Boathouse a small wood-fired sauna, community-run, seats up to six and offers the sea itself for the cold half of the ritual, weather and nerve permitting. The Highland Games fall on the fourth Saturday of July and the raft race usually in early August.

The Trust keeps a fold of Highland cattle, and in 2025 a two-year-old heifer named Mairead Ghaisgeal of Applecross took her class at the Black Isle Show, reserve overall Highland and best in her interbreed group, with a younger heifer, Elodie, third in hers. Their handlers, Mike and Flo, gave the show report its single line of comment: "We are very happy with these results."