Great Cumbrae

Millport is a Victorian holiday town on Great Cumbrae, built round a curving bay, with bicycles to hire for the ten-mile road that rings the island. A CalMac ferry crosses from Largs to Cumbrae Slip in about ten minutes, running so often that most people simply turn up rather than book ahead, and a bus or short cycle covers the three or four miles on from the slip into the town. In the town, the Cathedral of the Isles was built in 1849 to a design by William Butterfield and became a cathedral in 1876; it seats about 100 and is often called Britain’s smallest. Millport was also home for more than a century to a university marine biology station, founded in 1897 to study the wildlife of the Clyde; it closed in 2013 and is now run as a field centre. South across a narrow stretch of water, Little Cumbrae is a smaller, uninhabited island, privately owned and only reached by prior arrangement.