Ullapool

Catch and the Planned Harbour

The daily menu at the Seafood Shack is chalked up each morning according to what the boats have landed, so some days it reads hand-dived scallops in herb butter and creel-caught langoustines in garlic-and-thyme butter, and other days a tempura-haddock wrap and hot-smoked trout, and rarely the same twice. Kirsty Scobie and Fenella Renwick started it in 2016; within a year it had won the BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Award for best street food or takeaway, and their cookbook later took the Jane Grigson Trust Award. It is a takeaway trailer at 9 West Argyle Street. Fishermen drop off their catch here most mornings, which is why the board changes so often.

This is a town that was drawn on paper before it was built. In 1788 the British Fisheries Society set out to make a herring port on Loch Broom and hired Thomas Telford to lay it out: broad streets on a grid, a harbour edge, stores and curing sheds, whitewashed and regular. You read the plan most clearly from above, from Ullapool Hill, where the straight cross-streets run down to the water and stop dead at either the tidal loch or the mountains. At ground level those same streets frame the sea loch on one side and, across the water, the serrated skyline of the north-west Highlands — Ben More Coigach, the Summer Isles at the loch mouth, and An Teallach away to the south-west. The flat ground that made the grid possible is a glacial fan-delta more than thirty metres thick, a glaciofluvial deposit pushed out into the loch before anyone thought to build on it.

Shore Street and Quay Street carry much of the eating and drinking, and many of the central venues sit within a level walk of the ferry terminal, the museum and the harbour. The Arch Inn, on West Shore Street, is the one with tables at the water: a ground-floor bar used by locals and visitors that puts on live music, and an upstairs restaurant looking straight down Loch Broom. The kitchen leans hard on what is landed nearby — Murdo's Loch Broom prawns, Isle of Lewis mussels, langoustines, haddock, Cullen skink, smoked mackerel with pickled fennel and orange, a venison-and-pork terrine, beef cheek, and sticky toffee pudding to finish. The building belongs to the first phase of the planned fishing settlement, and the water it overlooks is the same water that put the town there. Dogs are not allowed in the restaurant, so this is not the pub for a walk-in with a wet spaniel.

Harbour Food and Fishing Memory

A few doors along the harbour, the Ferry Boat Inn — known locally as the FBI — is a small hotel bar and seafood restaurant with a compact frontage facing the boats. Its own pitch is old-fashioned in the good sense: wine, malt whisky and real ale, though the cask isn't always on, rather than a cocktail list. The seafood is the reason to go, built on smokehouse salmon, Wester Ross salmon, Lewis mussels, oysters and locally landed langoustines, with a Thai green seafood curry, fish pie and a sticky-toffee carrot cake among the things that come and go with the season. There is no enclosed garden, but drinkers carry their glasses across to the harbour wall, which is where the view is anyway. Well-behaved dogs are welcome inside.

The Seaforth, on Quay Street, is the big one: a harbour-facing bar, restaurant and music venue presenting Scottish produce with a South African streak. It won the North regional title at the 2023 Scottish Fish & Chip Awards, and the menu runs from fish and chips, mac and cheese and a beef burger to a Thai red curry, a land-and-sea platter and an "Ullapool Mess", using Loch Broom langoustines, Atlantic haddock and Stornoway black pudding along the way. There is a fire in the bar, outdoor seating over the harbour, and dogs are made welcome — the business even publishes its own guide to walking one round the village. The premises has been a fish-and-coal store, a chandlery and a smokehouse in its time; in the 1980s the offices upstairs housed fish agents trading with the Eastern European factory fleet out in the bay.

Culture, Cask and Independent Shops

For somewhere that is not quite a pub and not quite anything else, there is the Ceilidh Place on West Argyle Street — bar, café, restaurant, hotel, bunkhouse, bookshop and music venue in one, and designed to be a meeting place as much as an eating place. The actor Robert Urquhart, Ullapool-born, started it in 1970 in a boatshed attached to the house where he was born, and its own account of the founding idea calls it "a place where not only postcards but life histories would be written." The kitchen takes its deer from the hills and its lamb from local crofts, and the menu shows it: smoked-mackerel and beetroot pâté, salt-and-pepper squid, poached eggs with Aultbea black pudding, haddock with chips and a pea-and-mint smash, a smash burger with bacon and treacle onions, and a fried buttermilk-chicken flatbread. Pets are welcome in the restaurant, café and bar, and the bookshop, run by Justine Ritchie, is strong on Scottish fiction, poetry, Gaelic, hillwalking and natural history.

If you care about a proper pint of cask ale, the Argyll Hotel bar on Argyle Street is the one to aim for. It carries four handpulls rotating Scottish and other British ales, holds Cask Marque accreditation and has turned up regularly in the Good Beer Guide, which is a serious offer for a village this size. The food is seafood and steak — fish and chips in Dundonnell beer batter, a seafood plate of smoked mackerel, pickled herring and Ullapool malt-whisky-smoked salmon, a fish pie with smoked haddock, Wester Ross salmon and prawns, house pizzas — and dogs are welcome, with a garden to sit them in. A little further round, Rhidorroch Distillery's bar and eatery at 6 Shore Street is newer, and gentler on the legs: coffee and house-made cakes, soup and toasties, Highland charcuterie and cheese boards, and the distillery's own Loch Achall gin, with a sheltered drinks garden and books, games, a sandpit and a chalkboard for children. The building was once the Frigate, a pub managed decades ago by the grandfather of Katie, who runs the place now with Lawrie. Between these there is the Caley Inn, a relaxed bar and bistro inside the large Caledonian Hotel, and the Waterfront bar at the Royal Hotel on Garve Road, with terrace tables and a long whisky list looking down the loch — though the Royal does not take dogs, so check before you turn up with one.

High Street to Hillside

The high street rewards a slow walk. West Coast Delicatessen, opened by Shân Tunsley in 2013, stocks Scottish and continental cheeses, Great Glen charcuterie, Stornoway black pudding and Isle of Mull biscuits, alongside its own bridies, sausage rolls, quiche and brownies, with vegan and gluten-free among them. Deli-Ca-Sea does fish suppers cooked to order and has taken a Best Fish Supper North-West award. Out at Morefield, the Ullapool Smokehouse cures fish, meat and cheese over wood — heather-smoked and whisky-smoked salmon, Bloody Mary trout, venison-and-pork chorizo. At the Dipping Lugger, a single room is seated to one seasonal tasting menu at the same time, chef David Smith cooking shellfish landed in the loch outside; the building started as a Fisheries Society manse, was rebuilt to a Telford design, and became what is remembered as Ullapool's first bed-and-breakfast before it became this. There is also Oak & Grain, a wood-fired pizzeria that Dan and Adele Connell grew from a pizza van into a former Costcutter that had stood empty for over a decade, the Captain's Cabin — a family shop trading since 1946 out of a listed 18th-century warehouse — the Ullapool Bookshop on Quay Street, Highland Stoneware's studio where you can watch pottery being painted, and Hugh Penney throwing pots outside his West Terrace workshop when the weather allows.

The walking starts from the town itself. The Ullapool Hill circular is about four miles, moderate, uneven underfoot and with an optional steep pull to the summit; it climbs from near the village clock through woodland restoration to the overview of grid, harbour and loch. Gentler options fan out along the Riverside Path and into the Braes, good for waders on the estuary and higher views without a mountain commitment, and the short out-and-back to Rhue lighthouse crosses boggy grass to a pebble shore facing the Summer Isles. Ten miles south, Lael Forest Garden threads paths through an exotic arboretum and a compact gorge trail — the shelter to keep for a day the tops are in cloud. The serious hills are within an hour: Stac Pollaidh, Suilven, Cùl Mòr, Beinn Dearg, An Teallach. Those are mountain days that need their own planning, not extensions of a village stroll.

Road, Water and Reinvention

Getting here is a single road and a long one: the A835 runs about eighty kilometres up from the A9 near Inverness, some fifty-five miles in all, and there is no railway — a Garve-to-Ullapool line was promoted and even debated in Parliament in the 1890s, but the track never came, and the town has run on road and water ever since. Garve station on the Kyle line sits on the drive in; Scottish Citylink's 961 coach from Inverness is timed to meet the boat; and CalMac's ferry crosses to Stornoway on Lewis in about two hours forty. Nearby, Corrieshalloch Gorge drops sixty metres to the Falls of Measach beneath a Victorian suspension bridge; Ardmair Bay offers a shore of round stones for skimming under Ben More Coigach; and Knockan Crag, up the A835, explains the Moine Thrust and the geological argument it settled.

Ullapool has re-invented itself more than once. The herring that founded it collapsed and the fishery closed in 1978; the boats switched to mackerel, and through the 1980s and 1990s the loch filled with the Klondyke fleet — up to seventy foreign factory ships lying out in the bay to take the catch, their crews buying goods scarce at home, a few of them marrying and staying. That trade ebbed too, and whitefish and shellfish took over; the harbour still lands Rockall haddock, monkfish, crab and prawns, and counts itself among the top ten fishing ports in the country. Alongside the boats a quieter economy grew up around the Ceilidh Place and, later, the An Talla Solais gallery and the book and guitar festivals. On a working afternoon you can stand on Quay Street and watch a creel boat come in past the Stornoway ferry, with the mountains behind and the gulls doing what gulls do over a fish quay, and it is hard to say whether you are looking at a harbour or a stage set for one. The clock that marks the start of the hill walk is where people arrange to meet, and most days someone is standing under it, waiting for someone else.