On a sunny day the views across to Mull and Lismore are spectacular, but on a bad day I find the inner Oitir Mhòr anchorage more than bleak. Moreover a fish farm does not exactly enhance the place, a feeling that has been heightened by the arrival of an incredibly dull house where once there was nothing. No doubt ‘architect designed’ as they say. The outer anchorage between the uninhabited island of Eilean nan Gamhna and Kerrera is much nicer with a fabulous vista looking north, a stoney beach to land on, a lot of birds, impenetrable braken in the summer, and the remains of a blackhouse (to find it you will need the OS map).
The walk to the north end of Kerrera is good, with great vistas out to sea. At the very tip, above the shingle beach in the northwest corner of Charlotte Bay, is a rather subtle historical site — Cladh a’Bhearnaig, Cashel on the OS map. Apparently there was once a monastery here, now there is just a grassed-over 60-metre-diameter broken circle of old stones which to the untutored eye could have been a big sheep enclosure. These archaeological sites are profoundly unphotogenic.
Continue the walk to a much more in-your-face sight, and that is the view of Oban Bay from the granite obelisk on the hilltop, raised as a monument to David Hutcheson who died in 1880. With his brother Alexander, and David MacBrayne, he pioneered the first steamship services to the Western Isles, the precursor of CalMac ferries. The inscription proclaims “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 perhaps.
Of course you can get just as easily to the Hutcheson monument and the archaeology from Ardantrive Bay.
