Ullapool Bookshop

Ullapool is a planned fishing village on a sea loch, the ferry port for the Outer Hebrides, and for a place of its size it reads unusually well — a proper independent bookshop on Quay Street, open since 2003 and run by Katrina and William Thomson. The Thomsons are a Ullapool retail dynasty of a modest, admirable sort: Katrina's grandmother opened the Captain's Cabin gift shop in 1946, the family added Lochbroom Hardware in 1991, and the bookshop completes a trio of shops that between them have kept the village supplied with the necessary and the pleasurable for the better part of eighty years. The bookshop leans, sensibly, into Scottish and Highland writing, maps and local history alongside the general stock. In a village at the end of a long single-track drive, a bookshop this considered is not a given; that a third-generation family keeps it going is the reason it is here at all.