Isle of Skye

The Oyster Shed

A seafood shed up the hill from Carbost, shucking oysters to order over Loch Harport.

Welcome

A short, steep climb up a track from Carbost brings you to a shed of green corrugated metal and weatherboard, open to the weather at the front, with hand-painted signs, a wooden barrel by the door and a view down the hill to Loch Harport.

This is the Oyster Shed, and it is exactly what the name promises.

Inside, behind the counter, oysters are opened by hand and handed over on a metal plate with a wedge of lemon. There are scallops grilled with chilli, langoustines, crab, lobster and smoked fish to take home. Nothing is fancy: food comes in takeaway boxes and gets eaten at the black barrels under the canopy, with the wind off the loch.

Before you go

The Oyster Shed is a working farm shop and takeaway, not a sit-down restaurant: order inside and eat at the barrels under the canopy, looking down the hill to the loch.

What: Oysters shucked to order, and crab, lobster, langoustines, mussels, scallops and smoked fish, hot or to take home.
Where: A few minutes up the hill from the Talisker distillery at Carbost, with a small car park.

Opening hours

Their website

Monday: 11am–5pm
Tuesday: 11am–5pm
Wednesday: 11am–5pm
Thursday: 11am–5pm
Friday: 11am–5pm
Saturday: 11am–5pm
Sunday: Closed

Did you know

Five freshly shucked oysters and a lemon wedge are arranged on a metal plate.

Did you know

Skye's only oyster farm.

The farm was started in 1981 by Kenny Bain, a fisherman. Over 27 years he built it up to more than 200,000 Pacific oysters.

The Oyster Shed's counter is set beneath a chalkboard sign, a glass display case of oysters beside a hand-painted mural.

Did you know

A million oysters lost.

In 2011 a disease went through the farm and killed more than a million adult oysters. The answer was a shop: the shed opened in April 2012, with a counter and a small table.

A wooden sign reading The Oyster Shed, Carbost, spans the shed's timber-framed serving hatch above two branded barrels.

Did you know

It began in a burger van.

Paul McGlynn, who took the farm over from his father-in-law, started the shed as a seasonal pop-up, cooking mussels and scallops in an old burger van with a new front on it.

Barrels reading The Oyster Shed sit beneath a canopy overlooking a loch and hills through an open timber frame.

Did you know

Three years in the loch.

The oysters take three years to grow, in beds just down the hill. From the covered seats beside the shed you are looking straight over them.

The Oyster Shed's counter is set into a corrugated barn interior, its own hand-painted sign and a mountain-outline mural above wire baskets of oysters.

Did you know

A counter that was a sink.

Almost everything in the shed is reused: the oyster-opening counter was once a steel sink, and the display unit an old workbench.

Black barrels lettered with the shed's name line a covered seating area with mesh screens overlooking the moorland.

Did you know

The distillery sent people up.

When the shed started, the Talisker distillery down the hill sent visitors up to it, and gave it old posters during its refit.

Ben Lerwill

From our guide to Skye

No fancy cutlery or ironed tablecloths here – just a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin, deservedly popular farm-shop-cum-takeaway selling oysters and other fresh Skye seafood. If provenance matters to you more than posh decor, it’s not to be missed.