Things you didn't know about... the Isle of Arran

Measuring 20 miles by 10 miles, the Isle of Arran is sheltered from the Atlantic by the Kintyre peninsula.

The Isle of Arran is renowned for stone circles, built by Neolithic communities who flourished on the island before 2,000 BC. Machrie Moor alone has six stone circles, part of an elaborate ancient system.

Lochranza Castle on the northern tip of the Isle of Arran, was the model for the castle in Tintin's The Black Island. Brodick Castle, owned by the National Trust, is pictured on the Scottish £20 note.

The north of the Isle of Arran is rugged, barren and mountainous. It is divided from the gently rolling south by the Highland Boundary Fault, a crack in the earth's crust that cuts across the Isle of Arran, north east to south west.

This distinctive design of knitwear belongs to the Irish Aran islands, not the Isle of Arran.

It is one of the few remaining sanctuaries in the British Isles for red squirrels. Those marauding grey squirrels from North America never got a foothold on the Isle of Arran.

The Isle of Arran earned this nickname for its varied landscape that takes in glens, lochs, castles, and highland and lowland regions.

The lush south and east benefit most from the warming effects of the Gulf Stream, and are home to most of the Isle of Arran's 5,000 population. The main town on the Isle of Arran is the port of Brodick, on the east coast.

It was near the village of Lochranza in 1787 that James Hutton, the 18th century geologist, first identified his Hutton Unconformity. He observed stratas of rock lying in different directions, and worked out that the formation of the earth had been more complex than previously thought, and that the planet was much older. His work was as radical and influential in its day as Darwin's theory of evolution.

Three different species of whitebeam tree grow on the Isle of Arran and nowhere else in the world.

The Isle of Arran was once reputed to produce the best whisky in Scotland. For 150 years there was no legal distillery on the island, although in the early 20th century illicit producers flourished. Then, in 1995, Scotland's second newest distillery opened in Lochranza. Its Isle of Arran whiskies are already highly praised.