Aultbea

Lochside Food and Local Produce

The Aultbea Hotel keeps a wood-burning stove in its bar and a garden that runs down toward Loch Ewe, where you can take a drink in summer and look west across the water to the Isle of Ewe. The building served as officers' quarters during the war. The kitchen works with seafood, local game and vegetarian dishes, and it is one of the few places in the village to sit down for dinner in the evening.

For daytime there is Oran Na Mara, a café beside Drumchork with views over Aultbea, doing homemade cakes and snacks, with prawn sandwiches on its own bread, panini and lemon-and-lime cheesecake among the food. Aultbea Stores covers the rest: an independent licensed shop selling fresh fish and meat, deli and bakery goods, fruit and vegetables, and a shelf of single malts and craft gins, its notices signed by Yvonne. Look out for what the village makes and sells around itself — Ritchies' Aultbea haggis, black and white pudding, Ewe Brew beer, and a Loch Ewe clootie dumpling.

Landscape and the Wartime Anchorage

The village spreads thin along the east side of the loch, a crofting settlement of scattered houses around a bay, moorland and hills behind it and rocky shore in front. From the Drumchork viewpoint the whole scale of Loch Ewe opens out — a deep, sheltered anchorage, with the naval refuelling depot sitting below.

Loch Ewe became HMS Helicon in June 1941, a refuelling and assembly base, and from February 1942 the departure point for convoys carrying supplies to Russia. Anti-submarine nets were strung across the mouth of the loch. At times as many as 95 merchant and Royal Navy ships lay at anchor here. More than a thousand personnel were housed in huts, stores, workshops, a sick bay and offices, and the WRNS were billeted behind the pier. Gun emplacements still stand around the water.

Museum, Hall and Wartime Trail

One wartime building survives in the village itself: Aultbea Hall, a curved steel Romney hut, remembered locally as the NAAFI and cinema. Its bookable Crow's Nest room holds a full-size table-tennis table, a dartboard and a gaming table for air hockey and mini pool. The Arctic Convoy Museum, close to where the old butcher's shop stood, was the idea of four veterans — Jack Harrison, Jimmy McHugh, Spud Campbell and Chris Tye — who proposed it in 1998. It moved into the former butcher's in 2017 and has since taken in Bertie, thought to be one of the last Austin 8 NAAFI vans. From the museum a signed wartime trail runs down through the village to the shore and MacLennan Park, past interpretation panels and a mosaic made by children at Bualnaluib Primary School.

There is older history under all of this. The first Ordnance Survey recorded an inn, a school and a corn mill; the mill is gone. A small clapper bridge over the Allt Beithe is the only identified listed building in the village. The Free Church, its congregation dating from the Disruption of 1843, stands beside the war memorial where the A832 turns.

Mellon Udrigle, Inverewe and Getting There

For a beach, Mellon Udrigle lies north — shell sand at Camas a' Charraig with a rough four-kilometre circuit behind it and long views to the Summer Isles and the mountains of Coigach and Assynt. Inverewe Garden is about six miles down the road at Poolewe. Achnasheen, the nearest railway station, has four parking spaces, so onward arrangements are best made before you arrive; otherwise it is the A832 and the day-dependent Westerbus services that bring you in.

The Museum's Name and Message

The museum renamed itself in 2024 and adopted a motto in 2025: wars belong in the museum.