Oitir Mhor and Charlotte Bays

On a sunny day the views across to Mull and Lismore are spectacular, but on a bad day I find this anchorage more than usually bleak, a view that has been heightened by the arrival of an incredibly dull house where once there was nothing. No doubt ‘architect designed’ as they say. But the walk to the north end of Kerrera is nice, with great vistas out to sea. At the very tip, above the shingle beach in the NW corner of Charlotte Bay is a rather subtle sight – Cladh a’Bhearnaig, called Cashel on the OS map. Apparently there was once a monastery here, now there is a just a grassed over 60 m broken circle of old stones which to the untutored eye could have been a big sheep enclosure. These archaeological sites are profoundly unphotogenic, so there is not a photograph here.

Continue the walk to a much more in your face sight, and that is the view of Oban Bay from the obelisk raised as a monument to David Hutcheson who died in 1880. With David Macbrayne he pioneered the first steamship services to the Western Isles, the precursor of CalMac ferries; the inscription proclaims about him “by whose energy and enterprise the benefits of greatly improved steam communication were conferred on the west highlands and islands of Scotland”. Sit up here on a sunny afternoon taking in the scene, with a slim volume of poetry. Of course you can get just as easily to the Hutcheson monument and the archaeology from Ardantrive Bay.