Despite the name, Isle Martin has no connection to St Martin of Tours. The old Gaelic name, recorded in the sixteenth century, is *Ellan Mertack* - the *martrick* being an old word for the pine marten that once moved through the island's woods. A monastery is reputed to have been established here around 300-400 AD, putting it among the very earliest Christian sites in the west of Scotland. The physical evidence is sparse and indirect but suggestive: a stone bearing a Latin triple cross that may date from anywhere between 400 and 700 AD, almost certainly tied to the Celtic church. Higher on the island lie the ruins of a post-Reformation chapel or meeting house and a vanished street of houses with an old school, the wreckage of a community that once had enough children to need a teacher and a building.

For most of its history Isle Martin lived off the sea and the thin soil. It was an important centre for the fishing trade, with a curing station running here before Ullapool was even founded as a planned village on the mainland in 1788. The island was lotted into crofts in 1831 - the standard Highland reform of land tenure - and crofting continued until the 1960s. Most of the ground was used for cattle and sheep grazing; only a small patch at the southern end near the main settlement was workable as arable. Then came the war and the flour mill, built on the foundations of the old herring station. Workers were ferried daily across the narrow channel from Ardmair, with bakeries across the north of Scotland selling bread made from Isle Martin flour. The mill closed in 1948, its buildings dismantled, and the population drained back to the mainland - the long, familiar trajectory of a Highland island in the twentieth century.

In the 1960s Monica Goldsmith bought Isle Martin and took it out of crofting tenure. She wanted it managed for nature: she installed water and power, removed the sheep in 1969, and in 1980 gave the island to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds on the condition that it stay a conservation site. From 1980 to 1985 the writer Andro Linklater lived in the Mill House, finishing his acclaimed biography of Compton Mackenzie - an island holding a man trying to write about another island man. The RSPB's Bernard Planterose moved his family there in the 1980s and launched an ambitious broad-leaved woodland regeneration project, fencing out the rabbits and replanting native species, while monitoring the breeding and visiting bird populations. But by the mid-1990s the RSPB had concluded that Isle Martin was too difficult for them to manage from a distance. In May 1999, with the active encouragement of Mrs Goldsmith's daughter Oriole, they gifted the island instead to a new community trust proposed by the people of Loch Broom and Coigach: the Isle Martin Trust.

The trust improved the jetty at Ardmair Bay and now operates a seasonal ferry across the half-mile of water that separates the island from the mainland. A new pontoon went in in 2007. Some of the houses have been refurbished, and one is available to rent for those who want a few nights on an uninhabited Hebridean-style island with nothing but the wind, the gulls and the ruins of a flour mill for company. Guided walks and small events run through the season. The island sits at the head of Loch Broom, looking up Annat Bay to Ben Mor Coigach and out across the sound to the rest of the Summer Isles. A monastery, then a fishing station, then a mill, then a bird reserve, now a community asset - Isle Martin has belonged to a series of small groups of people who each took what they needed from it and then handed it on.