Loch Baghasdail - Boisdale's loch in Gaelic - is a long, sheltered sea inlet on the southeast corner of South Uist, big enough to anchor a fleet and reached through a complicated tidal channel guarded by the small Calvay island and the ruins of a medieval bastion. Bonnie Prince Charlie spent a night at Calvay on 15 June 1746, a few days after his defeat at Culloden, while he waited for someone to ferry him north toward Skye. The first proper lighthouse on Calvay was built in 1891 by the Stevensons, the dynasty of engineers who lit the dangerous coasts of Scotland. It was replaced by a small metal tower in 1985 - less romantic, but cheaper to maintain. The Lochboisdale ferry passes Calvay on its way in.

Walk the seafront now and the renovation is obvious. The old shop and surrounding buildings were either restored or removed to make way for new housing and commercial units. The whole village is within easy walking distance of the pier - the post office with its coffee shop, the all-purpose store called Failte (welcome in Gaelic), the Royal Bank of Scotland branch with a 24-hour ATM but only one open day a week. A kilometre away, on the small linked island of Gasaigh, Lochboisdale Development Limited opened a new harbour with mooring licences, fuel, showers, laundry, and wi-fi. The aim was to capture passing yachts on the Atlantic circuit - to give Lochboisdale a reason to exist beyond the ferry. Slowly, it is working.

The Calmac ferry to Mallaig takes three and a half hours in summer, longer in winter when the route sometimes switches to Oban and a five-and-a-half-hour passage instead. The outbound boat can in theory be reached, just barely, by the first morning train from Glasgow up the West Highland Line - one of the great rail journeys of Europe, past Loch Lomond and over Rannoch Moor and along Loch Eil to Mallaig - and then onto the ferry with bags. The return connection is more relaxed. The seas between the mainland and the Outer Hebrides can be hard work for an unaccustomed stomach. The Lord of the Isles is the workhorse that does the run, and her absences for refit have repeatedly stranded the islanders, a recurring point of frustration with Calmac's scheduling.

There is a postscript with a London accent. In 1989, a restaurateur named Ranald Macdonald - eldest son of the 24th Chief of Clanranald, a clan whose heartland is South Uist - opened a Scottish restaurant in Belgravia. He called it Boisdale, after the loch where his family's history sits. There are now several Boisdale restaurants across London serving Scottish beef, smoked salmon, and a long whisky list to an entirely metropolitan clientele. Most of the diners have never seen the place the restaurant is named after. The pier they take their name from is the same pier where their ancestors landed and left, where herring nets were mended in the lamplight, and where the ferry still pulls in twice a day to remind South Uist that the rest of the world exists.