We’re now in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull, the second largest island in the Inner Hebrides, and it’s beautiful here. Tobermory’s Main Street was a finalist in Google’s Most Picturesque UK Street Awards. Having spent the late afternoon moseying along it, it’s not hard to understand why.
Two ferries were needed to get here, one from the Lochranza on the Isle of Arran to Claonaig on the sparsely populated and little-visited Kintyre peninsula (yes, the one whose mull was made famous by Wings), and another from Oban to Craignure on the Isle of Mull. It was a beautiful, winding drive.
Gaelic is the language of the local folk around here. All of the road signs are in both Gaelic and English. The island is pretty inaccessible, the morning papers arrive in the afternoon and the locals like it that way.
When we arrived at the hotel at 15:30, the proprietor said, “I’ll go and see whether your room is ready.”
Things happen more slowly here. The pace of life is a few gears lower than that of the mainland and that’s part of the island’s charm.
We’re looking forward to exploring the island tomorrow. There are more foreign tourists here than on Arran, but still very few. They were virtually non-existent on Arran and the few we encountered were, of course, almost all Dutch. You just can’t ever seem to get away from the Dutch.