Glenuig

The Inn and Its Music

The Glenuig Community Inn stands at the head of the bay, a stone building with a fire in the bar and a beer garden that runs down toward the Sound of Arisaig. Since 28 October 2025 the village has owned it, run through a community benefit society, so the pub you drink in belongs to the people pouring the drinks. There is dining space inside, and on the right evening there are traditional-music sessions, jazz afternoons, quizzes and bingo.

Music is the thing here. Informal sessions have drawn as many as thirty players into the room at once, and the inn's long history of them helped shape musicians who went on elsewhere: Angus R. Grant of Shooglenifty and Iain MacFarlane of Blazin' Fiddles both developed their playing during nights at Glenuig. The local names run deeper still, through the Roshven Ceilidh Band and the pipers of the MacDonald family. "Glenuig has always been a place renowned for music and good craic," the community association says, and the room seems built to prove it.

Local Food and Provisions

The kitchen is run by head chef Tomasz, who cooks local Scottish produce with a Polish accent. Diners over recent months have mentioned Cullen skink, venison stew, mussels, mackerel pâté, roast beef, Scottish salmon cured with gin, orange and beetroot, and fish and chips. Well-behaved dogs are welcome throughout.

For everything else there is the Glenuig Community Shop, volunteer-staffed, part general store and part post office, selling everyday provisions, local produce, gifts and ice creams. A short way off, Ardshealach Smokehouse has been curing small handcrafted batches of fish, meat and cheese since the 1980s; Christoph and Christine Ewers run it now.

Bay, Chapel and Coastal Walks

The settlement itself is small, gathered around Glenuig Bay with the Small Isles out across the water. The post office is a mid-19th-century vernacular cottage, symmetrical and single-storey, listed as a good example of the Lochaber type. St Agnes's Chapel dates from the middle of the same century, built on Bishop Murdoch's orders with half the cost from his own pocket and the rest from local landowners and neighbouring priests. It is a compact chapel with no accommodation for a priest, who for years reached it just one Sunday in four, riding over from Dorlin.

The walking starts at the edge of the village. A track and path lead west to Smirisary, a part-restored settlement that no road reaches, and on over rougher, boggier ground to white sands opposite Eilean Coille; on a clear day Eigg sits out on the horizon. It is a 4.5-kilometre round taking two and a half to three and a half hours. For a longer day, the Rois-Bheinn round from Inverailort is a strenuous, largely pathless nineteen kilometres over Sgùrr na Ba Glaise and An Stac, the kind of hill day that takes nine or ten hours and gives back the Small Isles from the top.

Roadless Years and a Festival-Built Hall

Isolation is recent history here. Glenuig had no public road until 1966; before that people came on foot, on horseback, or by boat from Lochailort or Kinlochmoidart. Mains electricity did not arrive until 1983. Between 1783 and 1803 a clandestine Catholic seminary ran at Samalaman, in conditions basic enough that a bishop complained of keeping boys and young cattle under one roof.

The village hall came out of music too. Eleven years of Glenuig Music Festivals paid for most of it, residents raised £33,000, and Jean Llewellyn opened the building on 1 April 1995. It was made deliberately smaller than a full badminton court, sized for the people who actually live here.

Getting Here and Watching the Tide

Lochailort station, eight miles off on the West Highland Line, gets you within reach by train; Shiel Buses route 502 covers the last stretch, though a connection at Lochailort isn't always guaranteed, so it's worth checking times before you travel. From Samalaman Beach, a few minutes' walk from the hall, you can watch the tide come and go over sand.