Isle of Mull: Armada Gold, Sea Lochs and 300 Miles of Coast

Somewhere in the mud of Tobermory Bay, so the story goes, lies a ship of the Spanish Armada with gold in her hold. Searchers have been looking for her since the mid-17th century. They were still looking at the end of the twentieth. No significant treasure has ever come up.

That is the kind of island Mull is. A legend that refuses to die, a harbour full of painted houses, and 480 km of coastline folded into lochs, sounds and skerries.

Add water warmed by the Gulf Stream and a scatter of offshore islands, and you have a corner of Scotland that rewards divers who like their trips with a bit of history attached.

The galleon that may or may not be there

The accounts disagree, which is half the fun. One version names the Florencia, fleeing the English fleet in 1588, anchoring at Tobermory for provisions. A dispute over payment, a fire, the powder magazine goes up, and £300,000 in bullion goes down with her.

Another version says the ship was the San Juan de Sicilia, carrying troops rather than treasure. In that telling, the chief Lachlan Mor Maclean traded a refit for Spanish muscle in his feud with neighbouring islands. No gold in that story at all.

Either way, the bay has been picked over for three and a half centuries. Calve Island sits uninhabited just off it, and Tobermory itself remains the main settlement on the island, home to most of the year-round population of 3,063.

How the island is laid out

Mull is the second-largest island of the Inner Hebrides and the fourth-largest in Scotland, covering 875.35 square kilometres. Three big peninsulas run west from a mountainous core, and Ben More rises 966 m above all of it, the only Munro in the Scottish islands outside Skye.

The Aros peninsula in the north holds Tobermory, Dervaig and the white sand beach at Calgary. Ardmeanach, the middle one, is sparsely populated and almost cut off from the rest of the island by Ben More itself.

The Ross of Mull runs southwest to Bunessan and Fionnphort, where the ferry crosses to Iona. Columba landed there in AD 563 and founded the monastery that went on to Christianise much of the mainland.

West of the island the water fills with smaller land: Ulva, Gometra, Inch Kenneth, Erraid, Little Colonsay, Eorsa, the Treshnish Isles and Staffa of Fingal's Cave fame. Part of that indented west coast, with some of its offshore islands, is protected as the Loch na Keal National Scenic Area.

Then there are the Torran Rocks, a shoal of reefs, islets and skerries roughly 15 square miles in extent, lying southwest of the Ross of Mull toward the Dubh Artach lighthouse. Skerryvore is visible from the same stretch of coast.

When to go, and how cold it gets

The island's climate is moderated by the Gulf Stream, which is why the numbers below do not look as bleak as the latitude suggests. Summer visitors swell the population considerably, and the swell itself settles down in the same months.

July and August sit at 15 °C with the flattest water of the year, and August averages half a metre of wave height. March is the roughest month in the marine forecast data at 1.2 m, with the water at its coldest alongside February.

Topside, between dives

Mull has four castles. Duart towers over the eastern approach and became the MacLean stronghold after it arrived as a dowry; Moy, on the southern side, is a keep built by a cadet branch of the family. Aros guarded the Sound of Mull with Ardtornish opposite on the mainland.

There is a stone circle at Lochbuie on the south coast, and Bronze and Iron Age brochs at Dun Nan Gall and An Sean Chaisteal. People have been living here for something like 11,000 years.

Two distilleries, if that is your sort of surface interval. Tobermory, formerly named Ledaig, makes single malt Scotch; a second near Tiroran opened in 2019 and makes Whitetail Gin.

Time your trip for July and the Highland Games are on. The Mull Rally runs too, and Tobermory still draws visitors who recognise its colourful waterfront from the children's show Balamory.

Planning it

Mull sits in Argyll and Bute, off Scotland's west coast, with Tobermory in the northeast as the obvious base. Fionnphort is your jumping-off point for Iona. The island's own geography does most of the work of deciding where you spend your days, as described in the Wikipedia entry on Mull.

Summer brings the crowds and the calmest water at once. Spring and autumn trade a few degrees of warmth for a quieter harbour.

If you go looking for that galleon in Tobermory Bay, log the dive and tell us what the mud gave up. Rate the sites around Loch na Keal and the Treshnish Isles, note the temperature you actually found against the table above, and plan the Iona crossing with a buddy in Scubaspot.