Tarbert is a West Coast town which still harbours admirable ambitions, says Ron Clark

A breathtaking natural inlet, dotted with islets and with local fishing craft unloading at a rough-hewn quay; country folk shopping along the harbourside and fruits de mer restaurants proclaiming their presence with aromas more enticing than any advertising; taverns in which grizzled fishermen tell tales to scrubbed and polished townies just off their yacht.

What Mediterranean paradise is this? What haven in a sun-spangled sea?

Well, to be honest, the first paragraph puts a bit of a gloss on it. The town in question is just three hours down the road from Glasgow, a quick ferry hop

from Greenock, and only a spinnaker throw from Largs on a chartered yacht.

But, on the face of it, Tarbert on Loch Fyne has all the attributes which should entitle it to the first few pages of anybody's glossy brochure. The only missing ingredient is guaranteed sunshine.

When the enveloping drizzle comes over the isthmus from the West Loch, interspersed with the kind of rain which mocks the toughest tarpaulins, all the finer qualities of the town are washed into the harbour along with the detritus of the burn which runs down the hill from the church. And it will ever be thus because, despite the best efforts of global warming so far, Tarbert is never really going to be the sort of place where banana daiquiris outsell the pints of heavy.

It is still, in essence, a West Coast town, tough, huddled and dour, as it was when the Norse raiders from the Outer Isles hauled their longboats across the narrow neck of land to the west

of the harbour and Robert the Bruce threw up the square stone castle on the hill to challenge their passage.

The castle is still there, its ivy walls decorated with warning signs about their dangerous condition. It looks down on one of the finest natural harbours in Scotland sheltered, as the Clyde Cruising Club's Sailing Directions puts it, from ''winds from all quarters''.

The town grew up on the herring which used to silver the loch as far north as Inveraray and as far south as Skipness and the Kilbrannan Sound. Nightly the fleet of sweetly-raked, varnished boats would essay out, line astern, to fill their nets as the gulls wheeled in and out of their deck lights like the souls of

lost sailors.

Gunn's The Silver Darlings tells of the changes the herring wrought on the inhospitable coasts of Sutherland and Caithness. The book which charted Tarbert's fishing history is J. MacDougall Hay's Gillespie and, to its small band of admirers, it is every bit as great a classic. But the herring are long gone and only a handful of boats venture out now to scrape up the last of the queenies and bag the odd remaining shoal of prawns to seal into refrigerated lorries for the markets of France and Spain.

They have been replaced by catalogue-white yachts, stretching on pontoons from what used to be Dickie's Boatyard to the grass-topped stone keep in the middle of the harbour.

The structure of the town has not changed in the last 40 years - its character was recognised in time for it to be designated a conservation village - but its focus and its economy has shifted irretrievably across the harbour from the ice station which used to chill the wooden fish boxes to the new marina below William Leitch's old sail loft.

New pubs and restaurants have evolved to cater for the city visitors who disembark in a flurry of oilskins, although the old Rex cinema has long closed down. A new heritage centre guards the road to the West Loch, although the cafe on the main street has not changed its formica seats and mosaic-tiles - or its menu of sundaes and hot Bovril - for decades. A new slip by the dinghy club accepts cars from the Cowal peninsula, although the old pier just east

of it, which used to serve steamers from the Broomielaw, is derelict.

Unlike many West Coast towns which have slipped into gentle decline, Tarbert is trying hard to offer an open-handed welcome to visitors. The Victoria Hotel, on the road in from Glasgow, has been transformed from a pie and a hauf pub into a bright modern bistro with optimistic

outdoor seating which can cope with the biggest influx of race day yachties.

Round the harbour, the black and white-timbered bulk of the Tarbert Hotel lends the town gravitas and gives the impression of the sort of venue where civic worthies would gather to discuss matters of import. In France it would be called Hotel de Ville.

Continuing towards the fish pier, the row of shops appears not to have changed greatly since the days of MacBrayne's Mail buses, when knots of townspeople would gather on a Saturday to wait for the Glasgow evening papers with the football scores. The path up the hill to the castle is just on the right.

The walk round to the steamer pier is one of the most pleasant in Scotland, with views over to the deserted shores of Cowal on one side and a clutter of typically organic Argyll houses on the other. The Columba Hotel, in the middle of a row of mansions, has gained a reputation for good live entertainment.

At the end of the road is the crumbling remnant of what used to be a harbour breakwater. A scramble across the headland leads to two small inlets which, from the sea, look like golden beaches. In fact, they are made of countless millions of queen scallop shells dumped here by fishing boats and washed into clefts in the rocks by the tide. As they break down into sand, no doubt children will come to play on them, quite unaware of their provenance. And perhaps that is the ideal metaphor for the future of Tarbert.

Info file

For further information: Tarbert Tourist Office, tel: 01880 820429. Argyll, The Isles, Loch Lomond, Stirling & Trossachs Tourist Board, tel: 01786 445222