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Times
01-05-2025
- Times
Scotland's coolest island — where Kate and Will are celebrating their anniversary
With its beautiful wild Fairy Pools, its behemoth of a mountain the Old Man of Storr, its distilleries and fine dining, and its crags and hikes, the Isle of Skye has become a must-visit for half the world in recent years. This summer was busier than ever, with the honeypot sites experiencing a rise in visitor numbers, up some 9 per cent on last year, and queues of camper vans cataclysmically long. According to a recent Highland Council report, an estimated 300,000 tourists will cross the Skye Bridge to the island from the mainland this year. And still there is no tourist tax in place to ease pressure on the island's infrastructure. If Edinburgh intends to start charging visitors next summer, surely Skye must follow? While the local authority still procrastinates on that (stupidly, in my opinion, as someone who lives nearby), those in the know, fed up of the crowds, are looking elsewhere. When their attention turns to alternative Inner Hebridean islands, to seek an approximation of what Skye offers — lovely artisan food spots, chic places to stay, awesome scenery — they often find that the place that best ticks the box as a worthy alternative is Mull. As the second largest island in the group after Skye, and lying to the south, Mull rivals its more famous counterpart in all regards. Creating a similarly dramatic impression, it possesses its own powerful feeling of strangeness and remoteness, especially at this time of year when the late-summer light deepens along its ferociously scooped and carved 300-mile coastline, and the 966m peak of Ben More, occluded by mist, has a vaporous magnificence. Right now the swallows are lining up to leave, twisting over dunes as white as the cotton grass that fringes them, and sea lochs are giving way to tracts of russet moorland. Across the island many stylish things continue to appear. No wonder the Prince and Princess of Wales have picked it as the place to spend their 14th wedding anniversary. I was there in July with my boyfriend, Paul, and our dog. Our first stop was the island's capital, Tobermory, where a new restaurant, An Cala Ciuin, occupies the first floor of the Mishnish Hotel. There I found the chef Ross Caithness with his face pressed up against the window, watching the fisherman Alan make his way back across the bay with a full creel. Happily, today's menu would include langoustine tartare; it tastes of everything you have ever loved about seafood, plus hits of citrus and anise, as clear and lucid as the island air (two courses £43pp; The best place to stay in town remains the landmark Western Isles Hotel (est 1883). Positioned on a cliff above Tobermory, it was the location for scenes from Powell and Pressburger's 1945 masterpiece I Know Where I'm Going! — about a young woman trapped on Mull by bad weather and falling in love — which were filmed inside a bar called the Kiloran Room. It's just been reworked by the interior designer and presenter of BBC TV show Designing The Hebrides Banjo Beale, who's from Australia but is a dedicated Mull obsessive, and it now feels like a decadent whisky snug, with walls drenched in an inky, silky blue and velvet chairs orange as the island's sea buckthorn. I adore the relaxed, kindly hotel. It's the perfect autumn destination — a radio playing somewhere, springer spaniels prone in the conservatory. Looking through its windows on a grey day, the Morvern peninsula across the Sound of Mull looks as vague as an etching, as though the very possibility of a mainland were literally receding in the mind (B&B doubles from £100; One muggy day we drove west out of Tobermory, passing 'otters crossing' signs and the occasional car with a fishing rod sticking out of its window. At a bus stop in the middle of nowhere a lone hiker sat on a heavy rucksack engrossed in a book. All the way to Calgary Bay on the northwest shore, the sky was the colour of sardines — a metallic grey seamed with pink and lapis — and we heard plovers piping in the bladderwrack of the bay's white sand. There are several lovely beaches on Mull. Laggan Sands, on the southeast coast alongside Loch Buie, by the remains of the 15th-century Moy Castle, is reached through a path of old oaks and beyond a Bronze Age stone circle. • 17 of the best hotels in Scotland The day was turning clear and hot when we got there (too hot for midges, which now, in autumn, should be gone anyway). We walked past an old lodge house on the way to Moy Castle, and outside there were three pairs of pink children's Crocs, lined up neatly in the garden beside a chalkboard marking recent wildlife spottings: wild goat, mink, porpoise, sea eagle, adder, willow warbler. Fine and soft, the sand was pearly grey, dotted with massive boulders and tiny white shells, and we were the only people on it, the dog nosing the rockpools. At the Old Post Office tearoom nearby, a small crowd of hikers and campers ate black pudding on toast (mains from £4.50; When I stepped for a moment into the austere St Kilda's Church, there was just the low murmuring wind and afternoon light coming through small windows, illuminating a Victorian frieze of New Testament verse. We drove next to stay at a gorgeous shepherd's hut at Treshnish Cottages, which has a white wooden interior that's been delicately painted freehand with a floral design by the local artist Martha Mazur. It's like sleeping inside a jewel box (one night's self-catering for two from £130; From the big orange wood-fired bathtub in the hut's garden, the islands of Coll, Canna, Rum and Skye were smudges in the lilacky distance, giving the impression that they were floating or perpetually in the process of some kind of divine descent. The road south along the coast from the shepherd's hut takes you past the Gribun rocks — sea stacks, fissures and cliffs made of metamorphosed sandstone, jagged into by glaciers 100 million years ago. Later, when I was walking past, they appeared so glowering and dreadful that when I saw that a little wooden boat pulled up on the shore was named 'Rumpus' I just laughed at its nerve. There is a small catch to visiting Mull, or perhaps it's a benefit, as it keeps crowds at bay for now. Due to ageing vessels and cancellations, the intermittent unpredictability of the 40-minute CalMac ferry service there from Oban, where I live, can make arrangements tricky. A modernised fleet is promised by 2026, but in the meantime it's worth persisting. Once there, life is easy. Your only delays are likely to be caused by temptation. You can't drive two minutes in any direction along Mull's single-tracked roads without seeing a homemade 'for sale' sign. Eggs, jam, watercolours — everybody's making something, and many of the pop-up stalls and honesty boxes offer shop-grade produce. The new Isle of Mull Candles at Pennyghael has hand-poured candles so aromatic you scarcely need to light them (@isleofmullcandles); the Piece Box, a micro-bakery and takeaway in the village of Dervaig, sells crab flatbreads with chilli butter and, for the next couple of weeks in the season, pastries made with the last of Dervaig's rhubarb ( Nothing about any of these enterprises on the island feels remotely generic. The shepherd's hut comes with a wood-fired bathtub in the garden TRESHNISH HOLIDAY COTTAGES COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED My boyfriend — raised in Oban — used to spend his summers as a young teenager helping on a farm on Mull, readying the sheep for sale with two old farmers. One time we were walking up a road on the island and he suddenly pointed to a field and said: 'That's where I stood and wished I was one year older.' A year older and he could leave school and feel as free as this all the time. I could see that for Paul the memory, this elation of being on Mull, had real intensity. I thought of it when we stopped into Ardalanish Weavers on the southwest coast. It produces handsome tweed blankets on a loom powered by wind and solar and then dyed with plants from the island: nettle and woad, ragwort and daffodil. Its Sea Pinks shawl, dyed with madder root and camomile, ought to be on everyone's Christmas list ( • 11 of the best Scottish islands to visit We walked towards Ardalanish Beach below, where out to sea, beyond pink granite boulders and pink-silver sand, lay the isle of Colonsay. The Paps of Jura lie further south, and to the east the Slate Islands of Luing and Scarba. Behind us was a near-empty campsite in a large meadow full of buttercups and red clover (pitches £15 a night; Pulling slowly up past us came a car with a dad and three daughters inside, the youngest kicking the door open with her bare feet and doing a series of cartwheels directly from the back seat onto the flowers: pure joy. As her sisters dragged the tent from the boot to a good pitch, their father rested his head back on his seat, and closed his eyes. Whichever ferry they had caught, it was the right one. Antonia Quirke travelled independently. Return ferries from Oban cost from £49 for two people with a car ( This article contains affiliate links that can earn us revenue Where else to stay and eat on Mull Craigaig Bothy, Ulva Craigaig Bothy is fantastically off-grid ALEX MACLEOD Another fabulous place to stay requires a shorter, more reliable ferry hop from Mull to the community-owned Isle of Ulva, population 16. Here, after a two-mile hike — or a paddle round the coast in a kayak — you'll find the most fantastic off-grid stone bothy to rent, its old stone interior softly remodelled by Banjo Beale, with croft beds, and a front door painted yellow as a flame so it might be seen through any storm. Details Where to eat Croft 3 Croft 3 on the west coast serves exceptional food in an uplifting building like a Nordic chapel. No wonder it recently won an architectural award. Order the gorse flower negroni, and focaccia with haggis (mains from £8; Mull Bread Box At Ballygown, the Mull Bread Box does a sourdough loaf that's meltingly light rather than the usual chewy chore (from £5; @mullbreadbox). The Glass Barn Just outside Tobermory, the Glass Barn café uses its own Isle of Mull cheese in its dishes, served in a conservatory slung with vines. It also sells a delicious powerful spirit made from whey and steeped in botanicals, called Elixir of Sage, with a sweet undertow of eucalyptus (mains from £8.50;
Chicago Tribune
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island,' where the right concert can change your life
The firm of Forsyth, Carney, Powell and Pressburger likely provided some valuable pro bono counsel to the makers of 'The Ballad of Wallis Island,' a nicely spooned dose of whimsy that goes down quite well. The names above refer to Bill Forsyth, writer-director of the beguiling 'Local Hero' (1983), among others; John Carney, of 'Once' (2007) and 'Sing Street' (2016); and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, whose ripely seductive masterworks include one of my very favorite films, 'I Know Where I'm Going!' (1945). The mystical power of music floats through these and so many other movies close to our hearts. Add in a remote, romantically idealized coastal or island setting, a la 'Local Hero' or 'I Know Where I'm Going!,' and you're halfway home. We're never told where the island in 'The Ballad of Wallis Island' is, exactly. (Director James Griffiths shot it in Carmarthenshire, Wales.) Its few residents include Charles, a compulsive punster and wordplay natterer as well as a music devotee, played by co-writer Tim Key. The music Charles loves is confined, apparently, to one famous folk duo in particular. For a time this duo, McGwyer Mortimer — simpatico enough, musically and otherwise, to forego an ampersand — wrote beautiful, soulful songs together. They were big. They were in love. Then they split. When the film begins, Charles is wading out into the sea to meet the boat carrying the sullen McGwyer, played by co-screenwriter Tom Basden. Charles is rich, having won the lottery not once but twice. After the death of his wife, he has retreated into a cocoon of memories and a chipper sort of sadness. He has hired Herb McGwyer, his musical idol, to come to the island to perform a private concert. And when Herb arrives, he has not been told he'll be joined shortly by the woman who broke his heart, the Mortimer half of the now-defunct duo, played by Carey Mulligan. Key and Basden expanded their script from a 25-minute short film, also directed by Griffiths, 'The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island.' That short, made 17 years ago, was essentially a double act for the somewhat fallen star and his most ardent fan. The feature-length expansion creates new roles, for the character played by Mulligan; the island's apparent sole shopkeeper Charles likes but is too shy to ask out, played by the 'Fleabag' ringer Sian Clifford; and the smaller, thinner role of Mortimer's increasingly jealous husband (Akemnji Ndifornyen). The spark, you see, hasn't fully extinguished between Mortimer and McGwyer, though 'The Ballad of Wallis Island' has a nagging tendency to misjudge the comic and emotional value of McGwyer's mopey, lovelorn side. For that matter, Charles is written and portrayed by Key to be an amusingly clueless and frankly exhausting fellow. It's something of a miracle Key garners as many laughs as he does; his timing and delivery works on a wavelength that seems to belong to the tides, or an interior monologue running in Charles' head. Contrivances come, and go, but 'The Ballad of Wallis Island' rolls along, with just enough casual wit to buoy the story. Things like the tiniest soap bar in existence, greeting the visiting rock star when he takes a bath in his host's house, do their visual-comedy job and make way for the next bit. If you go, and I'm recommending you do, take the time to see the short film afterward. It's fascinating to see the decisions that were made in the expansion. I do wish the lower-key tenor of the interplay in the short had been retained for the feature; it has its aggressively charming side. But I'm guessing that American audiences right about now, subconsciously dreaming of an island escape, will find 'Wallis Island' a handy getaway. 'The Ballad of Wallis Island' — 3 stars (out of 4)
