Wednesday Walk - around Tobermory harbour on a visit to the isle of Mull, Scotland

Yesterday we took a day trip to the Isle of Mull, which sits of the west coast of Scotland. While there, we took a walk around the pretty town of Tobermory just before sunset.

Mull is quite a large island - the 4th largest in the UK, but is sparsely populated. Tobermory is the biggest settlement by far on the island and only has a population of around 1000 people !

The town is famous for its colourfully painted buildings along its harbour front. Its also famous for being in a kids programme called Balamory - which was based on Tobermory.

We got to Tobermory around 5pm, and parked up near the distillery. Tobermory is quite a nice quality malt whiskey. The distillery looks out over the harbour, which is the main part of the town.

From where we parked we then took a walk along the colourful street you can see above.

We passed the old church above, which is one of the prettiest buildings on the waterfront. Its now an art gallery, but was closed by the time we got there.

Quite close to the church is this lovely town clock. Behind the clock tower you can see the main pier that gets used by the local fishermen - they mostly creel for crabs and lobsters these day. I doubt much fish is landed here any more.

Just by the clock, I was able to get down onto the shore in the harbour by these couple of old boats.

The town gets a lot of tourists because its so pretty, and as such it has a lot of trinket shops. We always like wandering along checking them out, although the majority were closed because we got there so late. It was still nice to go window shopping through.

I really liked this door we saw on one of the bed & breakfast guest houses !

Above are the last 3 painted houses towards the sea end of the harbour. The yellow one is 'The Mishnish' pub, which is one of the two main pubs in the harbour area. I've actually played in the pub about 3 times when I was still gigging with a band. We'd have to get the ferry over, play the gig and stay the night as there was no ferry to get back to the mainland by the time we'd stopped playing. Those gigs were a lot of fun !

We continued on down to the end of the road where the Western Isles Hotel sits high above the harbour. It was quite a nice evening, considering its October - the weather can be pretty poor at this time of year on Mull.

We could see the lifeboat at the end of the harbour road. It does not go any further beyond there. The body of water beyond it, is the Sound of Mull, and the land you can see in the distance is actually mainland Scotland but a remote area called Morvern.

By this point, the sun was starting to get low, and we were being treated to some nice sunset views back across the harbour.

From there we walked all the way back around to the other side of the harbour where we saw these lovely old anchors being used as a display piece.

And from there we walked a little more to have a look out over the marina. Tobermory is very popular with people sailing the western isles, and as such this marina gets completely mobbed during summer.

From there we took in a few more views of the harbour before heading back to the car, as we had to drive to Craignure to catch the ferry back to the mainland.

It was great to stop of and take a walk around the harbour. We used to live in Oban on the mainland, which is where you catch the ferry to Mull, and have been quite a few times. But now that we have moved, its very unlikely that we will get back again very often (if at all) - so it was great to see it again, and we really enjoyed our walk around the harbour at sunset.