Rockpool

Rockpool is the independent gift and craft shop on Lochinver’s Main Street, small, well-curated, and the obvious stop for anyone wanting to bring something Scottish-made home from a Sutherland trip. The stock is weighted toward local makers and Scottish brands rather than the generic-tourist range that dominates many Highland gift shops: jewellery, ceramics, prints, books on local landscape and wildlife, soft furnishings, and a thoughtful smaller-objects range that suits the going-home suitcase as much as the day-trip browser.

The shop sits in the row of buildings along Main Street that runs back from the harbour wall. Lochinver’s village centre is small but tight: Rockpool is part of the working cluster alongside the Lochinver Larder (the pies that draw a lunch queue most days through the season), the Highland Stoneware showroom up at Baddidarroch, and a handful of cafés along the same stretch. It is the sort of village street where most of the shopfronts are independently owned and the pattern hasn’t been displaced by chain retail, the kind of high street that the bulk of small-town Britain no longer has.

Worth a stop on the way through for anyone touring the NC500 from Ullapool toward Kylesku and the Sutherland north coast.

Open through the main season; reduced hours in winter. No standalone website at time of writing.