Loch Kishorn reaches inland as a northern branch of Loch Carron, a slender sea-arm about 1.5 kilometres wide and 4 kilometres long. It hides surprising depth - up to 92 metres at its deepest point - which would later prove decisive. The Garra Islands guard the mouth, with Kishorn Island the largest of them. To the north and west rises the Applecross peninsula, crowned by the Corbetts of Beinn Bhàn and Sgùrr a' Chaorachain, and split by the famous Bealach na Bà - the Pass of the Cattle - one of the most dramatic mountain passes in Britain. The River Kishorn slips in from the north through a small estuary, and a scatter of settlements - Sanachan, Tornapress, Courthill, Achintraid, Ardarroch and Rhunasoul - shelter along the lochside. Locals call them all Kishorn, collectively.

The line of whitewashed cottages at Achintraid was not built for fishermen or farmers by choice. They were built for the people the landlords cleared. During the Highland Clearances of the early nineteenth century, families were driven from the inland glens to make room for sheep, and the displaced were dropped at the coast to begin again. Achintraid's cottages were their consolation prize: a strip of shoreline, a shingle beach, a view of the mountains. The injustice is older than memory now, but the geometry remains. So does the view: the Applecross hills, the pass climbing impossibly into the clouds, the loch reflecting whatever weather the Atlantic decides to send.

In 1975 Howard Doris began work on a fabrication yard for offshore oil platforms. The loch's 80-metre clear depth was the prize - few sites anywhere offered such a natural dry-dock with deep water on its doorstep. By 1977 over 3,000 people were working at Kishorn Yard, housed in temporary accommodation on site and aboard two ships moored in the loch. The planning condition was strict: the yard had to be treated as an island. Everything came by sea, nothing by road, so the Highland landscape stayed largely intact. In 1978 the yard delivered the Ninian Central Platform - 600,000 tonnes of concrete that needed eight tugs to drag it to its North Sea position, holding the world record for largest movable object until Gullfaks C took the title in 1989. Gordon Menzies of the folk band Gaberlunzie immortalised the workforce: We're the Kishorn Commandos way up in Wester Ross / We've never had a gaffer, we've never had a boss / But we'll build the biggest oil-rig you've ever come across.

By 1980 the oil downturn was biting. Two thousand workers were still employed in 1984, but parent company John Howard went bankrupt over Middle East contracts in 1986, and Kishorn Yard closed the following year. Most of the buildings were cleared. The dry dock found one more famous job in 1992, when the 2,300-tonne caisson footings for the Skye Bridge were built here, then floated into position to anchor the bridge to its islet. The East gate has not been moved since. In 2017 Kishorn Port Ltd was awarded £500,000 to revamp the dry dock gates - it took almost a week of round-the-clock pumping to drain the dock, an estimated seven million imperial gallons. The current owners, Ferguson Transport and Leiths, hope to bring the yard back as a manufacturing centre for offshore renewables. The Howard Doris Trust, set up from the yard's legacy, still funds the Howard Doris Centre in nearby Lochcarron, providing care for the elderly.

Tornapress is where the road to the Bealach na Bà branches off. From the loch's eastern shore, the pass climbs in tight hairpins to 626 metres, the steepest sustained ascent of any road in Britain. Drive it on a clear day and the view from the top is the whole Inner Sound: Skye, Raasay, the Cuillin teeth, and somewhere below, the thin glittering finger of Loch Kishorn. The Scottish Episcopal chapel at Courthill - a small white-walled building between Sanachan and Tornapress - has watched this view for generations. So have the Marilyns of An Sgurr and Bad a' Chreamha to the east. After the Commandos went home, the place returned to what it had been: a quiet sea loch with extraordinary views and a song about itself.