Colin MacIntyre’s beloved Mull inspires his music with the Mull Historical Society as well as his beguiling crime novels starring his policeman, Sergeant Ivor Punch. BooksfromScotland asked him to name his favourite places on the beautiful island.

An Island Burning
By Colin MacIntyre
Published by Black and White Publishing

Tobermory Lighthouse & ‘GOD IS LOVE’ 

This is secret Mull. If visiting Tobermory, you could walk to the famous yellow building on the seafront — the ‘Mishnish’ hotel and pub — and after a bit of lubrication, then continue to the end of the main street near where the Kilchoan ferry terminal is, and just beyond the slip, up on the rock face, you will see the words ‘GOD IS LOVE’ in big letters of white paint. This is not on the tourist trail. Everyone locally knows the folklore of these words and as a child I was fascinated with them. So much so, they have featured in at least two of my books to date. The story goes that a Minister was visiting the island over a hundred years ago and was walking the Tobermory Lighthouse path, which is above the letters, and his child fell off the path from the cliff edge to the granite rocks some fifty feet below. But, amazingly, survived relatively unharmed. Thereafter these words appeared in recognition of this apparently celestial intervention. Nobody in Tob knows who upkeeps the lettering. I have enjoyed fictionalising this story for my novels and have come up with an answer as to who has the white paint and brush. The walk up above to the lighthouse itself is also a stunning one along the north Mull coastline. About halfway along the walk the view opens out and you feel you are the only human alive. The lighthouse itself is a very peaceful spot and you feel you have really earned the view. Remember though, you have to walk back.  

Tobermory Highland Games Field / Tobermory Golf Course 

Two favourite places in one. The ‘Games field’ is actually on the golf course. This is a special place for me and my family. My dad and other family members had a strong link over 80 years with the Games. He and my uncles jumped so high and far in some ways they never came down. In fact my dad still holds some records 60 years on and I have fictionalised this field and made significance on the page of the sand pit. The golf course itself is a stunning links nine holes, situated high on the Mull coastline which has been admired by such golfing greats as Tom Watson. From anywhere on the course you can look out to the mainland and watch it watching you. Ben Hiant on Morvern sits majestic. It’s a view burned into my soul since childhood and one that now my characters inhabit too. It’s a challenging test of your game (but no bunkers!).  

Calgary Beach & Mull’s Atlantic Coastline  

Calgary is on the western, Atlantic, coast of Mull and is my favourite place on earth. It is a go-to spot for most Mull families and tourists alike. It has extra significance for me because I was also married there. My wife is a New Yorker so it was special to look out on the expanse between our two continents and, that day, briefly the ocean seemed to have shrunk to a handspan. I love standing and looking out from the sands to the almost symmetrical headlands and how all sense of time, urgency and the everyday, disappears. It has inspired me creatively too, in a song ‘Calgary Bay’ for which I recorded the waves. It was also the setting for my track ‘Somewhere In Scotland’ as well as the video for an early Mull Historical Society single off my debut album ‘Loss’, ‘Animal Cannabus’. In the first of my Mull Mysteries books, When The Needle Drops, it is also the setting for the book’s closing. My protagonist, Sergeant Ivor Punch, has a significant burial to make there relating to his childhood memories of the beach. From Calgary you can venture further around the Atlantic coastline to sleepy Ulva Ferry, and then on down to the Ross of Mull. The best drive on the island.  

Tobermory Clock  

The clock sits centre stage (page?) on Tobermory Main Street. Many know this seafront as one of the most picturesque in Scotland (Balamory etc!), but growing up it was just home. We didn’t know any different. Seafronts without coloured houses just seem dull by comparison. If you stand by the railings next to the clock on the seafront at the end of a sunny afternoon, when the ‘bustle’ has died down and the fishermen are coming in with catches, a certain kind of unique light always emerges; it is paradise. A seagull might even pass with a chip in its mouth. ‘The Clock’ is also the nickname of my protagonist and Mull sergeant, Ivor Punch, and the clock also featured in my debut novel. It was a teenage hangout and from the clock you are centre stage. It was originally commissioned by the Victorian explorer, Isabella Bird — who was the first western woman in many far flung regions of the globe, but who lived for a time in Tobermory — in honour of her younger sister, Henrietta. I have enjoyed writing each of the sisters into my fiction and adapted stage work. If you’re very lucky the fishermen might give you a bag of prawns too.  

Aros Hall 

The ‘Hall’ is where you feel the warm embrace of the Tobermory community. My current Mull Historical Society album is a series of collaborations with leading authors with me writing songs based on their significant rooms and photographs, and this would be my own favourite room. It has been central to the Tobermory community for over one hundred years. My Mull poet-banker grandfather used to chair the ceilidhs in the hall. It was also my first stage, with TRAX, my first covers band with family and friends. I nervously strummed the opening chords of The Clash’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’ and I had never felt a buzz charging through me like it — and not all the audience were my cousins. I was playing my new (well, secondhand) 1978 Fender Telecaster, which just weeks before had been waded ashore to Mull by my dad, the late BBC Political & Industrial Corespondent, Kenny Macintyre, who had missed the last CalMac ferry on his weekly commute home. My uncle had had to boat it over to the Morvern mainland to pick him up, but due to low tide they couldn’t dock back on Mull. My dad was suited, holding the guitar aloft above the waves as though he’d just won Wimbledon. I wasn’t actually there to see any of this, I just imagined it. I’m returning to the Aros Hall on my June Mull Historical Society and book tour and so it will be special to be back there, with that guitar. Islands are all about community. I hope you might enjoy mine.  

An Island Burning by Colin MacIntyre is published by Black and White Publishing, priced £9.99.