Badachro

Waterfront and Fishing Trade

The deck at the Badachro Inn runs along the water's edge, looking across Badachro Bay to Isle Horrisdale and a working jetty where local boats still come and go. Inside there is a bar, a fire and a conservatory that catches the light off the loch. Martyn and Lesley Pearson run the place; their son Mark works behind the bar. The kitchen leans on seafood landed directly by local fishermen, and recent visitors come away talking about the Cullen skink and the fish and chips. The ales rotate — An Teallach among them — alongside Tennents, McEwan's and Guinness. Dogs are welcome in the bar and the bar dining area; the deck can be busy on summer evenings, with views over the anchorage. Children are catered for with high chairs and a children's menu, and boats are often visible from the deck.

The Category B building dates to the early-to-mid-nineteenth century and probably served the fish-curing trade as the mainland supply point for the station on Dry Island, just offshore. The listing includes a quayside store, quay walls, a boathouse and jetties — a cluster of listed working-waterfront elements.

Fishing, Distilling and Village Shops

Badachro grew around fishing and salt. In 1911 three fish-curers worked here, keeping a year-round cooper and hundreds of bushels of salt, and the Dry Island station carried on until just after the First World War. The station itself, built around 1840, still has its stone jetty, salt store, probable curing shed, a boat-repair slipway and a walled vegetable garden. At low tide a causeway appears and you can walk across to it. It was once nearly self-supporting, with grazing for a cow and a hen shed.

There is no food shop in the village, which is worth knowing before you arrive to self-cater. What Badachro has instead is a distillery and a gift shop. The Badachro Distillery was set up in 2017 by Gordon and Vanessa Quinn, who met in Badachro and married less than twelve weeks later. They make gin, whisky, vodka and rum, hand-picking local gorse blossom, myrtle, lavender, rosehip, wild thyme, fennel, elderflower and seaweed to flavour them. Their tours take in the still room and finish with a tasting of five spirits. Just up the road, Latitude 57 is a nautically themed shop selling ceramics, driftwood work, jewellery, candles, soaps and puffin-themed gifts, with a small edibles counter. For actual provisions you go to Gairloch, where the Shop on the Pier stocks basics, wine and spirits.

Gairloch Diversions and Wilder Walks

Gairloch is also where the wet-weather options are: a leisure centre with soft-play, a sports hall and a climbing wall, and a museum built into a converted Cold War nuclear bunker, with a replica croft house and the original lens from the Rubh Re lighthouse.

A notable walk from here is the Fairy Lochs circuit, six kilometres and a couple of hours over rough, boggy moorland below Sithean Mor, with views back across Loch Gairloch towards Baosbheinn, the Wizard's Mountain. It passes the wreckage and memorial of an American B-24 Liberator that crashed in June 1945, carrying nine crew and six passengers home after the war in Europe; all aboard were killed, and the wreckage is left where it lies. South-west along the B8056 are the two beaches at Red Point and a longer coastal walk on to the abandoned settlement of Craig.

Reaching Badachro

Getting here takes some doing. The nearest station is Achnasheen, about thirty road miles off, with four free parking spaces and neither staff nor a ticket machine. Public buses this far down the shore are infrequent, so a car or pre-arranged transfer is the practical choice. The B8056 threads through crofting ground and small lochs to reach the bay.

Moorings and Summer Evenings

The harbour's four blue visitor moorings, on the south side of Isle Horrisdale, are looked after by a not-for-profit trust; Rob at Badachro Marine is the man to ask. In summer, the yachts swing at their moorings of an evening and the deck fills again, with the mix of people making conversation easy.