A ring of prehistoric stones outside the town hints that someone has been living here a very long time indeed. Lamlash brushed up against the Battle of Largs in the thirteenth century. In February 1548, during the rough chapter of Anglo-Scottish history known as the Rough Wooing, an English commander called Grey of Wilton proposed stationing warships at "Lammelashe" to intercept any French vessels trying to spirit the young Mary, Queen of Scots out of the country. They missed her. Her ship, blown back by adverse winds, anchored in the roadstead of Lamlash on 6 August - the same bay you are looking at now - before finally getting clear and reaching France. In the early years of the Second World War, the village became the training base for No. 11 (Scottish) Commando.

The basic character of Lamlash is a long, low ribbon of two- and three-storey houses lining the inland side of the shore road. Hamilton Terrace is the architectural set piece - two rows of single-storey-and-attic cottages designed by Sir John James Burnet in the late nineteenth century. Numbers 1 to 27 face the sea; another row sits behind, built so that families could rent out the front cottages to summer visitors and decamp to the back. The houses have changed remarkably little; some still have their original glazing. On the grass between the sea wall and the houses, three standing stones form a modern monument to people who once lived on Arran and were forced to leave.

The Clearances on Arran were less brutal than in many parts of the Highlands, but they happened, and Lamlash remembers them. When crofters in Glen Sannox were displaced to make way for large-scale sheep farming, many saw no choice but to emigrate. On 25 April 1829, eighty-six souls climbed aboard the brig Caledonia at Lamlash. The Reverend A. Mackay preached his sermon from a mound formed of their own belongings, taking his text from 1 Peter: "Casting all your care upon him: for he careth for you." The Caledonia reached Quebec City two months later. The Arran emigrants became pioneer settlers in Megantic County, Quebec, and later, more than four hundred made for Dalhousie in New Brunswick. The monument was raised, generations later, by their descendants.

Lamlash Bay is a fine natural harbour, deep and sheltered, large enough to have once held the Royal Navy's Home Fleet and Atlantic Fleet at anchor. Today it shelters a more modest fleet: an Atlantic 75 inshore lifeboat that covers the waters around Arran, and a summer ferry that runs out to Holy Isle, now home to a Buddhist retreat. The more remarkable thing about the bay, though, lies underwater. After a long, patient campaign by the Community of Arran Seabed Trust, the northern portion of the bay became Scotland's first No Take Zone in September 2008 - statutory protection for the seabed, won not by government decree but by a community insisting that the maerl beds and the marine life depending on them were worth saving. The wider south Arran waters now sit within a Marine Protected Area.