Inverasdale

The Schoolhouse and the Shoreline Settlement

The Old Schoolhouse sells tea, coffee and homemade cakes out of the building that was the village primary school for 136 years. It opened in 1876, closed in 2012 when there were no longer enough children to fill it, and reopened as a community tearoom after residents formed the Wester Loch Ewe Trust in 2015, which secured community ownership of the building in November 2018. There is a defibrillator by the door and a kitchen that caters for functions and workshops. On certain evenings between April and September, Ewe Brew arrives with a mobile tap-house and a wood-fired oven, serving cask beer and pizzas on the brewery's own sourdough bases. The Princess Royal called in on the trust in May 2026.

That is more or less the whole of Inverasdale in one place, because Inverasdale is not really a place so much as a line. It is a long, scattered run of crofts along the single-track B8057 on the western shore of Loch Ewe, gathered loosely at Brae and Midtown and trailing on through Naast, Mellangaun, Firemore and Cove. The croft grid was laid out in the mid-1840s, and by the time the first Ordnance Survey came round in 1881 there were sixty-six roofed buildings strung along the shore.

Landscape and Paths Along Loch Ewe

The shore alternates between rock and sandy bays. The views run east across the sea loch to the hills of the Great Wilderness, rather than out to open water, and behind the crofts a raised-beach escarpment rises from peatland and small hill lochs, the work of the Loch Maree Fault. Firemore has a sandy beach, north of the settlement, easy to reach.

From a walkers' car park just beyond the former Free Church, an old and rather wet path follows the foot of the escarpment for ten kilometres to Camas Mòr and its bothy, passing woodland, lochs and the deserted settlement of Lochadraing on the way. Take a map. Further north at Cove, a track climbs from the road end through the remains of a Second World War coastal battery, past gun and searchlight emplacements, to the Arctic Convoy memorial at Rubha nan Sasan.

The Convoy Coast

Concrete from the war years still sits in the heather. In January 1941 Loch Ewe became the assembly point for the Atlantic and Arctic convoys. More than a thousand service personnel came, at times outnumbering residents three to one, and up to ninety-five ships lay in the loch at once behind a three-layer boom net, barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns. One gun platform at Boor is a many-sided concrete slab the locals named the Threepenny Bit, after the coin. Churchill called the route these ships sailed "the worst journey in the world." On 26 February 1944 the American Liberty ship SS William H Welch missed the loch's entrance in a storm and broke apart at Eilean Furadh Mòr; twelve of seventy-four crew survived, pulled from the water by crofters, coastguards and servicemen. A two-kilometre walk from Cove reaches the memorial opposite the island.

Practical Stops in Poolewe

Aside from the seasonal Ewe Brew evenings, there is no pub in the village itself, and no shop. For those you drive four and a half miles south to Poolewe, where the hotel bar dates from 1570 and pours Poolewe Lager and Belhaven Best, and the village store sells Gairloch venison, Spindrift Croft eggs, fish from Sea and Sole, and locally tied fishing flies. Poolewe also has a small indoor swimming pool and the National Trust for Scotland's Inverewe Garden, whose sheltered planting grows at a latitude north of Moscow. The nearest railway station is a long drive east at Achnasheen, on the Kyle of Lochalsh line; no regular bus reaches Inverasdale, so check timetables before you travel.

Kay Matheson and a Living Community

Kay Matheson was born at Firemore in 1928, and in 1950 she was one of the four students who removed the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey. She became a teacher and a Gaelic campaigner, and helped found the museum at Gairloch that now holds her recordings of local singers. The mobile library still calls at Naast, Midtown, the old school and Cove, once every three weeks.