Rum

Behind the closed doors of Kinloch Castle an orchestrion waits in an Edwardian ballroom. Its millionaire creator imported hummingbirds, alligators and a fortune's worth of ambition to this rain-lashed Hebridean island; and the strange red castle beside the bay keeps its excess sealed like a time capsule, which somehow deepens the enigma.

Rùm is the bulkiest of the Small Isles, most of it managed as a National Nature Reserve. Kinloch Castle, built from 1897 for Sir George Bullough, preserves an extraordinary Edwardian interior, but the fragile building keeps its doors sealed — the island's appeal is the living wild, with the castle as its locked riddle beside the bay. The Rùm Cuillin traverses remote volcanic peaks in one of Scotland's most demanding island ridge days, and well over a hundred thousand pairs of Manx shearwaters — around a third of the world population — nest in burrows high on those mountains, streaming back from the sea after dark in one of Britain's strangest wildlife spectacles. The red deer of Rùm, meanwhile, have fed one of Earth's longest-running wildlife studies.