Ullapool, the herring port at the edge of the north-west Highlands

Most Highland villages grew where they could. Ullapool was planned. Before 1788 there was only a small hamlet here, a little over twenty households on a gravel spit pushing out into Loch Broom. Then the British Fisheries Society, a body set up to bring work to the Highlands and to make use of the shoals of herring that came into the sea lochs, chose the spit for a fishing station. It was one of three planned villages the society founded, with Tobermory on Mull and Lochbay on Skye, and of the three it is the one that most obviously still works as a port.

You can see the plan from the water. The streets run in a neat grid, parallel and at right angles to the shore, with the harbour along the front and whitewashed houses facing the loch. It looks like a small Georgian town that has wandered a long way from home, which is more or less what it is.

A town drawn on paper

The layout is often credited to Thomas Telford, the great Scottish engineer of roads, bridges and canals, and his name is attached to the town in most accounts. The truth is a little more complicated. The original plan was drawn by David Aitken, and Telford, who became the society's surveyor of buildings in 1790, improved it rather than redrawing it. He left a more certain mark in the parliamentary church, one of the plain, sturdy churches built to his designs across the Highlands. It now houses the Ullapool Museum, which is the best place to start if you want the story of the town told by the people who live in it.

The herring did not keep their side of the bargain. In the early nineteenth century they deserted Loch Broom, and the village that had been built to cure and pack them had to find other ways to live: farming, a little fishing for other species, and, in time, the ferry and the visitors.

The klondyker years

The town's second fishing boom came from an unexpected direction. Herring stocks had all but collapsed by the 1970s, and Scottish boats turned to mackerel. From the late 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, Loch Broom became the anchorage for a fleet of factory ships from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the klondykers, which bought the catch from the Scottish boats and processed it on board. Accounts of how many ships came differ, but at the busiest times there were dozens of them riding at anchor in the loch and in Annat Bay beyond, mostly between late summer and the new year.

Ullapool became, for a while, Britain's main mackerel port, and the harbour had to be extended to cope. The landings peaked in the mid-1980s. In the early 1990s the mackerel catch fell, the Soviet Union came apart, and the klondykers stopped coming.

What sheltered the factory ships shelters every vessel that comes here. The Summer Isles, a scatter of low islands a few miles to the west, lie across the mouth of Loch Broom and take the edge off the Atlantic, and the loch itself runs deep and narrow into the hills. The ferry to Stornoway on Lewis sails from Ullapool, and the town works as the hinge between the mainland and the Outer Hebrides.

Ullapool from the sea

The approach is the reason to come by ship. Loch Broom is a long arm of the sea between steep, empty hills, and the town appears late, a white line along the shore with the mountains of Wester Ross behind it. Once ashore, everything is close: the harbour, the museum in Telford's church, a few streets of shops and cafés, and a shore path for a walk along the loch. Travellers tend to find that the pleasure of the place is its scale. You can see the whole of it in an hour and spend the rest of the day looking at the view.

Three Fred. Olsen cruises in the catalogue call at Ullapool, each as one port among many on a voyage around Scotland's islands and sea lochs.

Scenic Isles & Lochs of Scotland is a five-night cruise from Liverpool in May. Alongside Ullapool, its places include Duart Castle, the Sound of Mull, Loch Hourn, the Small Isles, Kirkwall, Harp Rock on Lunga and Fingal's Cave on the Isle of Staffa.

Scenic Isles of Scotland is an eight-night cruise from Liverpool in July, with Portree, Ullapool, Kirkwall and Lerwick among its places, so it reaches Orkney and Shetland as well as Skye.

The longest of the three is Scenic Islands & Highlands of Scotland, nine nights from Newcastle in September. Its places include Invergordon, Lerwick, Portree, the Isle of Staffa, the Dutchman's Cap, Duart Castle, Loch Hourn, Ullapool and Kirkwall.

If the day ashore is short, walk to the end of the spit, look back at the grid of white houses, and remember that it was drawn for the herring. It was a reasonable plan. The fish simply had other ideas.