The bay is bounded by the Rubha Mòr peninsula running northwest to southeast in the south, with the Summer Isles archipelago scattered just beyond. To the north, the coast climbs toward Lochinver, the principal settlement on this stretch, tucked into its own inlet. Two larger sea lochs - Loch Inver and the bigger Loch Kirkaig - cut inland from the bay's northern edge. The mouth runs from Rubha na Coigeach (known in English as Ru Coygach) to Rubha na Brèige, or Kirkaig Point, on the eastern side. The names alternate between Gaelic and anglicised forms, a quiet record of which language reached which headland first.

On the southwest coast, an inlet pushes inland from Achnahaird Bay, where a wide sweep of white sand catches the western sun. Eastward lies Garvie Bay, smaller but no less striking, its own crescent of sand backed by bracken-slopes. Beyond that, the coast crumples into Lag na Saille, then Polly Bay, where the River Polly - the largest of the fast little streams feeding the bay - empties past Green Island. Further still, the sea loch Loch an Èisg Brachaidh slips inland behind clusters of low rocky islets. These are beaches you reach by single-track lane and a walk down through machair grass, not by signposted car park. The reward is solitude on sand that, on a clear day, could pass for the Hebrides.

Eilean Mòr - simply 'big island' in Gaelic - sits in the northeast corner, the largest of the bay's scattered islands. Fraochlann Island lies less than a quarter mile to the north, and Eilean Mòineseach follows, smaller again. Green Island guards the southeast. None of them are inhabited; they are nesting grounds and seal haul-outs and waypoints for kayakers paddling out from Achnahaird. Looking inland from any of them, the unmistakable silhouette of Suilven rises across the bay - that 731-metre Torridonian sandstone whaleback that Norman MacCaig wrote poems about, a peak so distinctive that mariners used it for centuries to know where on the coast they were.

From Achnahaird, when the cloud breaks the right way, a glint of sunshine picks out the long ridge of Quinag across Enard Bay to the north. This is the John Muir Trust's mountain now - bought and protected in 2005 - and its three Corbett summits saw-tooth across the horizon. The view stitches the whole Assynt-Coigach National Scenic Area together: bay in the foreground, islands in the middle distance, ancient Lewisian gneiss bedrock everywhere underfoot, and Torridonian sandstone peaks rising in the distance. The rocks here are among the oldest in Europe. The landscape they make is one of the youngest, scraped down to its bones by the last ice age and left to weather in Atlantic wind.