The Linnhe Storehouse, Appin: spiced, not spicy, and the best thing on the table

For a good part of the trip we called it Loch Leed. We could see it from the road, we could see it from the B&B, we pointed at it and said there is Loch Leed again, and not one of us ever thought to check.

It is not Loch Leed. It is Loch Linnhe. And the castle you look at from the table, the one that appears to be sitting on a rock in the middle of the water, is not even in it. It sits in Loch Laich, which is an arm of Loch Linnhe. You will have your own version of this, probably somewhere in Wales. There, that is settled, and we can carry on with slightly less shame.

The rest of it is a cafe in a big, very bright building on the A828, between Ballachulish and Oban. We went one morning in August and, for once, we were not going there to eat badly.

Caroline found it, I had given up

The night before we had eaten at Roam West, near Onich, off a good Scottish pub menu: venison, fish and chips, burgers, mac and cheese, bangers and mash. We enjoyed all of it. We also shut the menu thinking that was quite enough of that for one week. We are not going to pretend pub food is exotic to you. You know exactly what six days of it feels like, because you can do the same to yourself over a long weekend at home.

Destination

Roam West, Inchree: the kitchen shuts at half eight, so we rang ahead

It has been raining since Fort William, it is dark on the A82, and we are at the point where the only question that matters is whether anyone, anywhere, is...

Read more →

So that evening, in the room, Caroline did what she always does once I have given up: she looked. And she found The Linnhe Storehouse & Cafe, a place we had never heard of, in a hamlet we had never heard of either, Portnacroish. Sold.

In the morning we left Rocklee, our B&B in Ballachulish, and it took about twenty minutes of driving south to get there. Twenty minutes of a holiday morning to go and eat a quinoa salad, in Scotland. I put that down without comment.

Destination

Rocklee, Ballachulish: a B&B on the old goods yard, and the best host we have ever had

The best host we have ever had. There, said in the first line, and after all these years staying in other people's houses across a dozen countries, we do not...

Read more →

A car park full of motorhomes

The first thing you see on arrival, before the building: the car park, and a fair number of motorhomes on it. Big, flat, easy to manoeuvre, with room for the sort of vehicle that fits nowhere else on this road.

That lands with us. Our very first trip to Scotland was in a motorhome, and we know exactly what it is worth to come across somewhere you can simply pull in, without reversing three times in front of an audience. If you are driving a van on the A828, make a note of the place, if only for the break.

The ceiling goes up like a bell

Inside, we were not expecting this. The room is a very large polygonal space, close to octagonal, and the ceiling goes up a long way, in white-painted boards that meet in a bell above the tables. The pendant lights hang in mid-air on long cables.

The result is light coming from every direction at once, even on a morning as grey as ours was. The tables are spread out, you do not have your neighbour in your ear, and you can see outside from anywhere in the room. It is a long way from the low ceilings and dark wood of the pubs we had been working through since the start of the trip.

× ❮ ❯

What was here before

The sign can mislead you, so let us deal with it now: Storehouse is not a heritage word here. It is not a converted warehouse. It is a brand new name over a building that had been a cafe for a long time already. In English the word does most of the work by itself, which is presumably the point.

For more than twenty years the place was the Castle Stalker View Cafe, and it was the automatic stop for anyone going up or down this road. It closed in the spring of 2025 when the people running it moved on. The team behind the Pierhouse Hotel, the hotel and restaurant at Port Appin next door, took on the lease, did the building up over the winter and opened the doors again just before Easter, a year later.

Ten jobs created at the reopening, across the kitchen, the front of house and the shop. Because that is the other half of the place: a cafe, but with a proper shop corner of Scottish produce, crafts and groceries, which is where the Storehouse comes from.

No, it is not a ruin

From our table we sat looking at that heap of stone in the distance thinking, right, a ruin on its island, of which this country supplies three a day. Completely wrong. That castle is somebody’s house, and there are people living in it.

That is exactly what we had in front of us, and you will understand the confusion: the cafe garden in the foreground, the loch behind it, the hills disappearing into the mist, and that small dark shape on the water that we had taken for a rock with a few remains on top.

It is Castle Stalker, a four-storey tower house, and the name comes from the Gaelic Stalcaire, the hunter or the falconer. Before it there was a small MacDougall fort on the rock, around 1320. The Stewarts took the lordship of Lorn at the end of that century, and it is they who built the tower you see, around the 1440s.

Then it goes off the rails in a very Scottish fashion. Around 1620 a drunken bet moved the castle to the Campbells. Yes, a bet: that is the version everybody tells, and nobody seems remotely embarrassed by it. The Campbells eventually let it go around 1840, when it lost its roof, and it stood as an open shell for decades.

It took until 1908 for a Stewart to buy it back and make it safe, and until 1965 for Lieutenant Colonel D. R. Stewart Allward to take it on and spend the best part of ten years on the work. Today it is Category A listed, privately owned and lived in, and it opens on a handful of dates in summer, by arrangement. So: not a ruin. An address.

The Castle Aaargh from Monty Python

Then the second layer, which you very likely half know already, so let us just settle it rather than make a revelation of it. That castle is Castle Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh, from the end of Holy Grail, the one where the Grail is meant to be and where the police turn up and put a hand over the lens.

Usually, when we check a story like that, we end up taking it apart. In Glasgow we had to explain that no, Harry Potter was not filmed at the university, whatever half the internet says. Here it holds. What is worth knowing is the other half of it: nearly every castle in the film is the same Doune Castle, shot from enough angles to pass for ten different places. Castle Stalker is the only other real one, filmed from outside, a few hundred yards from where we were eating our soup.

Why Appin still carries a trial from 1752

If you did Kidnapped at school you already have the outline of this, which saves us both some time. On 14 May 1752 Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure, the Red Fox, the government factor charged with clearing Stewart tenants off forfeited land, was shot dead in the woods of Lettermore near Duror, a few minutes from here.

James Stewart of the Glen was arrested. His alibi was solid, so he was tried not as the man who fired but as an accomplice. The jury held eleven Campbells out of fifteen. The judge presiding was the Duke of Argyll, chief of Clan Campbell, which is to say the dead man’s own clan chief. Nobody has ever pretended it was fair.

He was hanged on 8 November 1752, on a gibbet put up above the narrows at Ballachulish. Which is to say, for us, a few minutes from where we had slept. The man who fired was never identified, and Robert Louis Stevenson built Kidnapped on the case, which is why it travelled well beyond the Highlands.

A sausage roll, a salad and two soups

The menu is chalked on the big black wall at the back, and it is short, which is usually a good sign. Breakfast until the middle of the day, a few toasts, lunch in five or six lines, sandwiches. And, above all, vegetables that genuinely exist: avocado, quinoa, broccoli, edamame, rocket, several vegetarian options, a veggie haggis. After several days of pub food it stands out.

I had the Sausage Roll, seeded with pumpkin and sesame, served with a small pot of sauce, one of the cheaper lines on the menu. Caroline had The Linnhe Salad, the house dish: quinoa, broccoli, edamame, rocket, carrot, red cabbage, sesame and a sesame dressing. And we both had the same soup, the Ham Hock & Lentil.

× ❮ ❯

The soup we did not see coming

That was the surprise of the meal. A lentil and ham hock soup arrives modestly: a white bowl, a slice of wholemeal, butter on the side, nothing announcing anything at all. And it turned out to be very good and heavily spiced.

Spiced, not spicy. There is no heat in it at all. There is seasoning, and something that has been built rather than blended. English hands you that distinction for the price of one letter, which is more than the French version of this piece got. It is the three-line dish on a menu that nobody orders, and that ends up being the best thing on the table.

× ❮ ❯

We thought we would leave hungry

Before the food came we looked at each other thinking, right, we will be up and hungry again within the hour. The plates are not enormous, a salad is a salad, the sausage roll fits in one hand. In the event we left properly full, without effort and without needing to finish the job with a cake in the car park.

That fits something I have noticed since the start of the trip, and I offer it as what it is, a personal impression rather than a nutritional theory. In Scotland, even when the portions look modest, you often get the sense of eating good ingredients and very little filler. It fills you up without having to be enormous. Then again, I had ordered fish and chips the night before, so take my evidence for what it is.

More Isle of Mull cheddar

A detail that made me smile reading the menu: the signature sandwich here is an Isle of Mull Cheddar & Pickle. The night before, at Roam West, the house pasta dish was a Mac and Mull, with exactly the same cheese. Two different kitchens, two opposite styles, and the same island cheddar, half an hour apart by road.

That is not a coincidence, it is how this whole stretch of coast works. The house lists its suppliers without any fuss: Letterfindlay Foods, black pudding from Ardfern, bread from Argyll Bakeries, coffee from a Glasgow roaster. You start recognising the names from one address to the next, and that is probably the best sign you are in the right place.

Practical information