Isle of Mull

We took the 45-minute ferry from Oban to Craignure on a morning so grey I almost talked myself out of the whole detour. Lia hadn’t, though, and by the time the boat nosed into the Sound of Mull, the clouds had thinned just enough to catch the water in silver. I remember gripping a lukewarm coffee at the rail, watching the mainland shrink behind us, and thinking that this was the first trip in a long while where neither of us had checked our phones once during the crossing. That alone told me something about the place before we’d even landed.

Tobermory is the reason half the postcards of Mull exist, and it earns it. We wandered the curve of the harbor with ice creams we didn’t need, past houses painted mustard yellow, dusty pink, deep blue, all crowded shoulder to shoulder against the hillside. I ducked into a tiny distillery shop just off the front and came out with a bottle I still haven’t opened, saving it, I think, for a day I want to remember this one by.

The next morning we drove out toward Duart Castle, seat of Clan Maclean since the 13th century, sitting right on its promontory like it’s still keeping watch over the Sound. I liked that it didn’t feel staged for tourists — the wind off the water was real enough to make Lia zip her jacket to the chin, and the stone underfoot was uneven in a way that made you believe people had actually lived and defended this place for eight hundred years. We stood on the ramparts longer than we needed to, mostly just looking.

But it was the wildlife that undid me. A local guide took us out along the coast in a small boat, and within twenty minutes we’d seen a white-tailed sea eagle — reintroduced here in the 1970s and 80s, and now nesting again like it never left — drop toward the water with a wingspan that made my stomach do something strange. Later that same afternoon, a fin broke the surface a hundred meters out, unhurried, a minke whale doing exactly what it wanted with no audience in mind. I’ve traveled a lot since moving to Mexico, and I don’t say this lightly: I’ve rarely felt that small and that lucky at once.

We never made it across to Iona that trip — Fionnphort’s little ferry was running, but we’d run out of days, and I’ve kept that as an excuse to go back rather than a regret. Mull has a way of making you feel like you’ve only seen the outer edge of it, which I suppose is the whole point of an island.

When to go: aim for April through September, when the ferries run reliably and your odds of spotting eagles and whales along the coast are at their best.