Kishorn

Seafood at the head of the loch

A sky-blue cabin sits at the head of Loch Kishorn, facing west across the water towards Skye and the Applecross hills. This is the Kishorn Seafood Bar, open since 1996. Local boats bring langoustines, lobsters and hand-dived scallops to the kitchen door. The owner is Lucy Kerr and the resident chef is Daniel Chlebny, and seafood prices vary daily, with items subject to availability.

What appears depends on the catch, but the range is wide: a mixed seafood platter, squat-lobster tails with orzo, seafood sushi, hot- and cold-smoked Loch Torridon salmon, Skye mussels, Ockran oysters, dressed crab. There is a luxury fish pie built from scallops, crab, langoustine and mussels. For anyone who has driven a long way and wants something they can hold, there is an Attadale Estate venison burger, a handmade beef burger, and one called the Angel and Devil. The 2019 Food & Drink Guide called the shellfish platter "the best of Wester Ross on a plate."

A scatter around Loch Kishorn

Kishorn is not really a single village. The name covers a scatter of settlements around the head of the loch, among them Sanachan, Ardarroch, Achintraid, Tornapress and Courthill. The A896 drops steeply from Lochcarron into Sanachan; a minor shore road then runs through Ardarroch to Achintraid, where whitewashed houses curve around the bay. The shared outlook is west across the sea loch to the steep eastern face of the Applecross mountains.

On the north shore is the thing you cannot ignore. Kishorn Yard was built by Howard Doris Ltd from 1975, with a dry dock 160 metres across, made to cast the first stage of the concrete Ninian Central oil platform. By 1977 more than three thousand people were working here, on a loch fringed with crofts and birch wood. The yard closed in 1987, but the dock reopened in 1992 to make two concrete caissons, each seventeen metres across and weighing 2,300 tonnes, which now hold up the main span of the Skye Bridge.

Walks from shore to mountain

For walking, the clearest low-level route runs from Achintraid out to the Kishorn Islands. A forest road of about two and a half kilometres passes ruined townships and loch viewpoints before a rough track drops to shingle beaches opposite the islands, where there are seal colonies and otters along the shore. Park in the lay-bys at the entrance to Achintraid rather than driving into the township. Stronger walkers can take on Beinn Bhàn, a fourteen-kilometre Corbett circuit of nearly a thousand metres of ascent, much of it pathless and steep; it is a five-to-seven-hour day and asks for hill skills.

The Bealach Cafe and Gallery

At Tornapress, the Bealach Cafe and Gallery sits at the foot of the Bealach na Bà, the single-track mountain road up to Applecross. Homemade soup, sandwiches and home baking are served alongside a gallery of work by local artists, from jewellery and weaving to ceramics and textiles.

Courthill Chapel and the Murray windows

At Courthill, a chapel survives where the great house did not. Courthill House was unroofed after the estate was sold in 1946, but its converted service wing had become a Scottish Episcopal chapel in 1901, the work of the Inverness architect Alexander Ross. It is still in use. Inside, under a Romanesque chancel arch, two memorial windows remember the Murray children: Elspeth, who died aged four in 1885, and her brother Alasdair, who died of his wounds in the Boer War in 1900.