Low and almost treeless, Tiree gets so much sun and so much wind that surfers and windsurfers come for the Atlantic swell, and the Tiree Wave Classic, the world’s longest-running professional windsurfing event, is held here every October. Beaches of white sand and turquoise shallows ring most of the coast, backed by machair, the flower-rich grassland that grows on shell sand behind Hebridean beaches. Near Vaul on the north coast, a broch, an Iron Age drystone tower, stands close to the Ringing Stone, a boulder covered in Bronze Age cup marks that rings like metal when you strike it with a pebble.
At Hynish in the south-west, the Skerryvore Lighthouse museum tells the story of Alan Stevenson’s lighthouse, around 11 miles out to sea and the tallest in Scotland, built between 1838 and 1844; the shore station’s keepers’ cottages and signal tower still stand. Around 700 people live here, most of them around Scarinish, the main village. CalMac ferries reach Tiree from Oban, by way of Coll, and Loganair flies in from Glasgow.
