Scottish oysters to be served up in Highland village, voted the most scenic place to eat fish and chips

The picturesque fishing village of Plockton is internationally famous as the setting for popular television drama Hamish Macbeth and 1970s cult film The Wicker Man

With stunning sea views and a bay lined with palm trees, it is known as the Jewel of the Highlands and was recently voted the most scenic place in the country to enjoy fish and chips.

Now there is more good news for those who like seafood with their scenery. A new delicacy will soon be on the menu – local oysters.

Driven by his love of the sea and a desire to get out from behind a desk, Plockton resident Alexander Mackenzie has set up a small oyster farm a short boat journey from his waterfront home. Now he is planning to expand the site into a commercial-scale operation, cultivating both native oysters and the more commonly farmed Pacific variety.

“In my previous job, I would just be sitting in the house all day in front of the computer and I would look outside and wish I could be out there doing something,” he said.

“The oyster farm is my route into doing this – an outdoor job. It’s great being out there on the water, doing stuff with boats, out on the loch when the weather is nice.

“To be fair, even when the weather is bad it’s still a great place to be. It’s good for the soul and great exercise.”

As well as bringing a new revenue stream to the local area, including potential jobs, it is hoped the oyster farm will also help re-establish native oyster beds in local seas around Plockton and beyond, where they were once abundant.

Native oysters are slower growing than the more commonly farmed Pacific species, taking around double the time – up to four years – to reach edible size. Picture: Plockton Oysters

Oysters are considered ‘ocean superheroes’ because of the benefits they provide to the marine environment, including filtering pollutants from the water, providing important habitat for other sea life and locking up climate-warming carbon in their shells.

Native oysters were once plentiful around Scotland’s coasts, including in Wester Ross, providing an important food source for people since prehistoric times. But overfishing, disease and pollution have seen the molluscs almost wiped out in many places, with numbers down by around 95 per cent over the past couple of centuries.

Mackenzie is already running two lines of oyster-rearing equipment at his Plockton Oysters site in Loch Carron, first deployed in 2022.

Around 8,000 natives, which take up to four years to reach harvestable size, and 40,000 of the faster-growing Pacifics, which are ready for the table after 18 months to two years, have been put in the water so far, with more to come. If his expansion plans get the go-ahead, he hopes to add a further ten lines.

Alexander Mackenzie has already laid down around 40,000 Pacific oysters, some of which are now almost ready for harvest. Picture: Plockton Oysters

This will allow him to rear between 250,000 and 300,000 of the molluscs each year, with the aim of selling the stock commercially. So why an oyster farm?

“I like raking about on the beach and finding stuff, like old oyster shells,” he said. “I just started reading about oysters, especially about the natives as they can be found on the shore around here.

“Then of course there’s a big push for rewilding and restocking all these ancient oyster beds. I got really interested in that and went to a few conferences and to start with I was looking at how I could try and breed the native oysters that were here.

“I was looking at that for about three years, but it’s quite complicated and you need to be a bit more scientific than I am. So the next idea was to farm them and to find out how I could do that. That was it really – and here we are.”

Plockton, known as the Jewel of the Highlands, is internationally famous as the setting for popular television drama Hamish Macbeth and 1970s cult film The Wicker Man – and was recently voted the most scenic place in the country to enjoy fish and chips. Picture: Ilona Amos

Farmed oysters minimal intervention to grow – in the correct conditions they need no feeding and chemical or medicinal treatments to thrive, meaning the site should have no adverse effects on the marine environment.

“Compared to most types of farming it’s much less impactful,” Mackenzie said. “With shellfish, you just need to put them in the sea and they are quite happy, nature does the rest.

“In terms of a modern sustainable food source, oysters are about as good as it gets. I don’t think there are any downsides. Not everyone likes oysters, but farmed shellfish is a totally sustainable, environmentally friendly food source and we should probably eat more.”

Mackenzie uses kit supplied by innovative Canadian company Oystergro. “Finding the Oystergro system was great because it’s ideal for here,” he said.

“You don’t need a big beach site, a tractor or a shed. The Oystergro system is designed for similar sea conditions in Canada, and you just need a boat to work on the farm. It’s perfect for Plockton and for me.”

Despite the impacts of climate change, which is warming seas and affecting the ability of species to survive in their usual environment, Mackenzie is confident oysters have a strong future in Plockton.

Alexander Mackenzie set up Plockton Oysters in 2022 and now has plans to expand to a commercial-scale operation. Picture: Malcolm Mackenzie

“I know there has been a big spike in sea temperatures this year, but not actually here,” he said. “I’ve been monitoring temperatures and they have been pretty standard throughout the year. Other places have been 4C or 5C higher than usual.

“Probably the major problem that would cause would be a higher risk of disease for natives and issues with the Pacific oysters – classified as an invasive species – spreading into the wider marine environment.

“At the moment the waters here are too cold for Pacific oysters to breed, which means they don’t spread, but that might change if the temperature was to rise significantly.”

He hopes in the future to take on other workers, including his partner Fiona Mackenzie.

“The initial idea was to keep the operation quite small and just sell them myself – a one-man-band,” he said. “Now I would like to go a bit bigger.”