Isle of Seil

Seil is the island you can drive to. Twelve miles south of Oban, the B844 crosses the Clachan Sound on a humpbacked stone bridge built in 1793, a single arch high enough for boats to pass under at high tide. The sound opens into the Atlantic at both ends, so the crossing has been called the Bridge over the Atlantic for the best part of two centuries, and technically the name holds up. At the far side sits the Tigh an Truish Inn, the House of the Trousers, where islanders once changed out of their kilts before heading to the mainland in the years after 1745, when tartan was banned.

The island runs about four miles top to bottom. Balvicar, in the middle, has the shop, the boatyard and a nine-hole golf course. Kilbrandon Church, on the road south towards Cuan, holds five stained glass windows by Douglas Strachan, made in 1937 and worth stopping for. At Cuan itself a small ferry crosses the 200-metre sound to Luing, where the tide can run through at nine knots.

Most visitors head west to Ellenabeich, a village of white single-storey cottages below a steep crag, built for slate quarriers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Seil is one of the Slate Islands, the group that roofed the world, and the industry here ended in a single night. On 22 November 1881 a gale and an exceptionally high tide breached the wall holding the sea out of the village quarry, a pit dug 76 metres below sea level on what had been the islet of Eilean a' Beithich. The workings flooded before morning, 240 men and boys lost their jobs, and the pit was never pumped dry. It still sits behind the cottages, a ring of rock enclosing seawater.

From the pier a passenger boat makes the four-minute run to car-free Easdale Island, and wildlife boats leave for the Corryvreckan whirlpool. An Cala, a garden laid out in the 1930s, opens in season. Parts of Ring of Bright Water were filmed round here in 1969. Give the island a full day rather than a quick loop off the Oban run.