Mull was the first Hebridean island we visited in the late 1980s, staying at the Gelenforsa Hotel next to the island airstrip overlooking the Sound of Mull. Glenforsa Airfield was built by the Royal Engineers between May and August 1965 to act as the only fixed-wing air ambulance evacuation facility on Mull. The airstrip is grass, not tarmac. The Glenforsa is a Norwegian wooden log hotel, imported from Norway and built in 1968. In 1975 the hotel and airstrip had been the central location for what came to be known as The Great Mull Air Mystery and David Howitt and his family still owned the hotel when we stayed there, although they sold the hotel just before our last visit and the character of the hotel changed under the new owners. The hotel has since changed ownership.
Mull was where we first saw otters in the wild and we have been lucky enough to see them on many other islands since then. It was also a great place to see red deer and golden eagles as well as the more common buzzards and seals.
Mull was my first real experience of single-track roads. There was only a short section of double carriageway road on the island between Salen and Craignure and it was referred to as “the motorway” by local residents. The island did have a narrow gauge railway running between Craignure and Torosay Castle and we were disappointed to discover on our return in 2018 that it was no longer operating and the track had been taken up and the engines and rolling stock sold off. Also, Torosay Castle was no longer open to the public. However, the single track road round the west coast was just as spectacular and somewhat daunting in places with several blind bends where you hope not to meet another car coming in the opposite direction necessitating one of you having to reverse to the nearest passing place with a steep hillside on one side and a drop to the sea on the other bounded only by a low stone wall although there are now metal crash barriers in some of the more worrying spots. It’s worth making a stop to view Eas Fors waterfall as it plunges over the cliff to the sea some way below. The waterfall is just north of the ferry to the island of Ulva. On our first visit we were able to summon the ferryman by sliding a board on the ferry building at the slipway to show a red square and we were transported to the island in a small rowing boat. The following year we were disappointed that the rowing boat had been replaced by a small aluminium motorboat, not much bigger than the rowing boat. There is now even a tearoom on the island in the former boathouse.
A visit to Mull would be incomplete without driving the 35 miles from Craignure to Fionnphort and taking the passenger only ferry to Iona where St Columba founded a monastic order. The medieval abbey has been restored and is a popular site for Christian pilgrimages even today and is the spiritual home of the Iona Community, an ecumenical religious order based in Glasgow.
In recent years Mull has become much more well-known because of the CBBC series Balamory and also the many TV programmes such as Springwatch featuring the resident population of Sea Eagles. Bizarrely on our visit to Mull in 2018 after a break of some 30 years we didn’t see a single otter or sea eagle despite the ubiquitous signs telling of their presence.