Poolewe

River Ewe provisions and café baking

The Village Store and Post Office sits beside the River Ewe, the short river that runs out of Loch Maree before reaching the sea at the head of Loch Ewe. Inside you can buy Gairloch venison, Spindrift Croft eggs, honey and vegetables from nearby crofts, Sea and Sole fish, fresh bread, Ewe Brew real ale, and fishing flies tied locally. It is a well-stocked licensed grocery.

A little further on, Bridge Cottage Art Cafe bakes its own sourdough and fills the counter with haggis pasties, cheese scones, carrot cake and chocolate-chunk brownies, alongside soup and hot filled rolls. It is family-run and dog-friendly, with outdoor seating and a gallery upstairs showing work by Jennifer Henderson, Iain Sutherland and Ailsa Watson. Regulars tend to mention how easily they were made welcome.

Coaching-inn hospitality and wartime tea

The Poolewe Hotel stands at the head of the loch in a building it traces to 1570, when it was a coaching inn. The bar pours Poolewe Lager beside Belhaven Best, Belhaven Black and a changing guest ale, and the kitchen does fish and chips. Capacity is limited, so it is worth booking rather than arriving and hoping for a table.

Pool House keeps a café, North by Northwest, in what used to be its billiard room, now hung with wartime photographs, signs and Admiralty china and watched over by a ship's figurehead named Ajax. The baking includes lower-sugar recipes from the Second World War, and a cream scone tea can be taken as part of a tour of the house.

Loch Kernsary and Inverewe’s planted oasis

For a proper walk, the round of Loch Kernsary is ten kilometres and takes about three hours: rough, rocky and boggy underfoot on the way out, then an easy track back, past volunteer-planted native woodland and a stand of oak, with views to Fisherfield, Torridon and Liathach. Shorter routes run through the Inverewe estate, where the Pinewood Trail is a mile and a quarter and links back to the village. Dogs are allowed on the designated paths on short leads.

Inverewe is a major attraction on the village's edge. In the 1860s Osgood Mackenzie began planting an exotic garden on bare, rocky ground his mother had bought, and his daughter Mairi Sawyer carried it on before giving it to the National Trust for Scotland in 1952. Californian redwoods now stand where there was almost nothing, red squirrel, otter, seal and both golden and sea eagles live around the estate, and offshore lie maerl beds the Trust calls Scotland's coral reef. The first house burned in 1914 — naval men saved the furniture and the pets — and Mairi built the white-harled house that stands there now. She described what her father had made as "this little oasis of peace and interest."

Convoy history and the road to Poolewe

The loch has a harder history too. Between 1941 and 1945 it was one of the country's main convoy anchorages, with as many as 95 ships gathered at once and servicemen outnumbering residents three to one. Pool House became the Russian Arctic Convoy command headquarters, and a wartime trail now runs past surviving gun emplacements and a brick water tower left standing between Tournaig and Poolewe.

Poolewe sits on the A832, and the lanes around the loch narrow to single-track in places. The nearest station is Achnasheen, about an hour away by road, with the Wednesday 711 bus making the connection.

The Pictish stone at Inverewe

In the old burial ground at Inverewe, roofless and probably seventeenth-century, a flat stone is incised with a crescent and V-rod — the most northerly Pictish symbol stone accepted on the western mainland of Scotland.