A magical journey to the Old Forge, a pub with no peer
It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, according to Robert Louis Stevenson.
Well, the Treasure Island author obviously never enjoyed the pleasure of a pint at Inverie’s Old Forge.
As pubs go, the Old Forge is garlanded with superlatives. It’s one of the most remote in the world, lying an 18-mile hike over mountains or a seven-mile sail from
the port of Mallaig, at the end of a rail journey once voted the best in the world.
I’ve taken the journey twice, an indulgence which seems utterly otherworldly during these days of frozen travel and closed pubs. Still I’m warmed by the memories.
The first was to cover the story of London artist Sam Firth, a filmmaker who’d moved to the area and won funding to film herself standing on the same spot at the same time every day for a year. Nice work if you can get it.
The train journey – judged the greatest in the world by readers of Wanderlust
Magazine – from Glasgow lives up to the hype, slicing along lochs, round mountains, over sites of historical magnitude and awesome natural beauty. Rannoch Moor, the Monessie Gorge, Glencoe and the Glenfinnan Viaduct are among its jewels and, as one epic view gave way to another, I switched seats a dozen times to drink it all in, arriving in time for one of the few tiny water buses from Mallaig to the peninsula.
On a midsummer’s night the sunset was there to greet me as I sat in the west-facing window of the Old Forge in the hamlet of Inverie, my fish dinner plated and local pint poured.
A spontaneous session of fiddles, guitars and accordions accompanied the setting sun, as I made friends for the night with my neighbours at the next table, each of us content in the perfect confluence of time and place and people, carousing in a corner on the edge of the ocean.
My second visit? The Old Forge was under the management of its new Belgian owners. It was closed, and had been for weeks.
This tiny community knows what a gem it has on its shoreline. It must be sure to let it shine.