Four days in Oban: shellfish on the pier, and a boat to an island every morning

Walk up first. John Stuart McCaig was a local banker who wanted a monument to his family and work for the town's stonemasons in winter, so from 1897 he built a granite ring on the hill in imitation of the Colosseum. He died in 1902 with only the outer wall standing, the museum and the statues never happened, and what is left is a circular shell with high arched windows and a garden in the middle. The view over the bay to Mull and Lismore is the best in the town.

North along the shore, a crumbling tower stands over the sound: a MacDougall stronghold of the fifteenth century on a rock that has held a fort for a thousand years, with a small museum and gardens in the house below it.

Then the distillery in the middle of the high street, working since 1794, which makes it older than the town around it. It makes a malt that sits halfway between the smoky island style and the softer mainland one, and the tour takes an hour.

The long day, and the reason to come. The boat leaves early for Mull, a coach or your own car crosses the island to the far south west, and a small ferry runs the last mile to Iona.

Columba landed here in 563 after leaving Ireland and built a monastery of wattle and turf that became the intellectual centre of the north: the Book of Kells was probably begun here around 800 before the Viking raids drove the monks back to Ireland with it. What stands now is a Benedictine abbey of the thirteenth century, wrecked at the Reformation and rebuilt in the twentieth by a community that still runs it, with a graveyard beside it where a long line of early Scottish kings is said to lie. The island itself is three miles by one, white sand at the north end, and the light on it is unlike anywhere else on this coast.

Boats from Iona and Fionnphort run out to Staffa in the afternoon. It is an uninhabited stack of hexagonal basalt columns with a cave driven deep into the south end of it, reached along a ledge with a handrail, and the sound of the swell inside it is what Mendelssohn turned into the Hebrides overture after visiting in 1829. Puffins nest on the top from May to early August.

Mull deserves a day of its own, and the ferry lands you next to the best thing on it. Duart sits on a headland where two sounds meet, a blunt thirteenth century keep with later ranges around it, seat of the Macleans, sold off in the nineteenth century and bought back and restored in 1911 by a chief who was seventy six at the time. It is still lived in, and the top floor holds a display about the scouting movement, because a later chief ran it.

Then drive north to Tobermory, which is the picture on every book about Scotland: a row of houses along a curved harbour painted in strong colours, built in 1788 as a planned fishing station and now mostly restaurants, galleries and boat trips.

The distillery at the end of the harbour has been working since 1798 and makes two very different malts, one soft and one heavily peated. The island museum a few doors along is small, volunteer run and better than that suggests, with the wreck of a Spanish galleon in the bay among its stories.

Three miles north of the town, on a rock at the mouth of the loch, sits a stout thirteenth century castle with walls following the shape of the outcrop and a ruined chapel of the same date in the trees behind it. Flora MacDonald was held here in 1746 on her way to the Tower of London for helping Charles Edward Stuart escape.

The gatehouse is still a residence, and the hereditary captain is required to sleep in it three nights a year to keep the title, which is the sort of arrangement Scotland is full of.

From there it is about two hours and forty minutes to Glasgow, an hour and a half north to Fort William, or twenty minutes back to the ferry pier if you are carrying on to the islands.