Qualla: Lamlash

Lamlash: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pencefn, CC BY-SA 3.0. Stand on the seafront at Lamlash and look east, and there it is: a sleeping mountain in the water. Holy Isle rises out of the bay in front of you, a humped silhouette that has carried the same name, in one form or another, for nearly fifteen hundred years. The town behind you takes its name from the island, not the other way around. Around the year 590, a Celtic monk called Molaise spent time in a cave on Holy Isle, and the Gaelic Eilean MoLaise - Molaise's Island - softened over centuries through Elmolaise and Lemolash into Lamlash. By the nineteenth century the name had hopped across the water to the village on the shore.

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Image: Pencefn | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lamlash: A Long Memory

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K, CC BY 2.0. 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,...

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Image: gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K | CC BY 2.0

Lamlash: The Houses on the Shore

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vincent van Zeijst, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 c...

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Image: Vincent van Zeijst | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lamlash: Departure From the Pier

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit secretlondon123, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 sou...

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Image: secretlondon123 | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lamlash: The Seabed They Saved

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ...

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Image: M J Richardson | CC BY-SA 2.0