The name Tobermory comes from the Gaelic Tobar Mhoire, meaning Mary's well, a reference to a spring nearby that was dedicated in ancient times to the Virgin Mary. The town below the spring was a much later invention. In 1788 the British Fisheries Society, hoping to bring industry to the Highlands after the Clearances, founded a planned fishing port at the head of the bay. Its layout was drawn up by the great Dumfriesshire engineer Thomas Telford, who would later design canals, roads, and bridges across half of Britain. The grid of Main Street, the rising terraces above, the careful relationship between harbour and houses, all come from Telford's pen. Until 1973 it was the only burgh on the island. As of 2022 the population was 1,045, roughly a third of everyone living on Mull.

The seafront's bright colours, lilac and red and blue and ochre, are not original. They were a 20th-century decision that turned out to be a stroke of marketing genius. Between 2002 and 2005 the BBC filmed Balamory, a children's show, using the seafront as its main backdrop. Two decades later, anyone who grew up watching CBeebies arrives in Tobermory with a strange sense of recognition. The Mishnish pub, the bakery, the harbour wall, all look like a stage set. The colours shift over time as owners repaint, so the Balamory map that visiting parents bring is never quite up to date. The same painted street featured in the 1971 Alistair MacLean thriller When Eight Bells Toll, where Tobermory played the fictional port of Torbay. Even Saki, the Edwardian short-story master, gave the name to a cat who learns to speak English.

Halfway along the harbour wall stands a small Gothic clock tower. It is a memorial. Isabella Bird, the Victorian travel writer who rode horseback through the Rocky Mountains and the Yangtze valley and pretty much anywhere else she could reach, spent stretches of her life in Tobermory, where her sister Henrietta kept a house. Isabella often helped the local doctor on his rounds, and on one occasion served as anaesthetist while he removed a tumour from a Tobermory woman. When Henrietta died young, Isabella funded the clock tower as a memorial to her sister. It went up on the harbour wall, where it still tells time to ferries arriving from Kilchoan. The town that gave its name to a children's TV show also gave us one of the most travelled women of the 19th century.

During the Second World War, HMS Western Isles operated out of the bay as the Royal Navy's Anti-Submarine Training School. Its commander, Vice-Admiral Sir Gilbert Stephenson, became famous as the Terror of Tobermory for the merciless drills he put green Atlantic crews through. The composer Felix Mendelssohn passed through in 1829 on his way to Staffa, an excursion that inspired his Hebrides Overture and is now commemorated by the annual Mendelssohn on Mull Festival. And the town gave its name, improbably, to a mineral: tobermorite, a calcium silicate hydrate found in rocks near Tobermory in 1880, is the same compound that gives ancient Roman concrete its remarkable durability. Roman engineers used it accidentally. The mineral is named for a town that didn't exist when Vesuvius buried Pompeii.