Burghead

Two inns and the old station

The Harbour Inn sits on Granary Street beside the harbour, and if you want to eat there you book ahead. The fish and chips come in a batter reviewers describe as very light and delicate, the chips are homemade, and the chicken curry has a following. Thursday is Steak Night. There are five en-suite rooms upstairs and Sky and BT sports on in the bar. It is one of three pubs the Clavie Crew hands smouldering embers to for luck each January.

The Station Hotel keeps the name of a railway station that closed in 1963. It serves pub food from five in the evening, steak pie among it, good portions and great value by one account, across a public bar, a lounge and a dining room, to a local neighbourhood crowd.

From Grant Street to the headland

The Bothy Bistro on Grant Street bakes its own bread and cakes and grinds its own coffee, working from local Moray ingredients and whatever seafood has come in. It runs seasonally. In the reported period it was shut until autumn, the team having decamped to Bootleggers in Hopeman for the summer.

Burghead sits on a peninsula pushing north-west into the Moray Firth, sea on three sides, about eight miles from Elgin. Locally it is the Broch and the people are Brochers. At the point stands a white circular building — a former coastguard lookout, now the visitor centre — and it is a good place to stand and watch for dolphins and whales, which turn up along this coast regularly.

Old rails and Pictish earth

The walk east to Hopeman is about 2.75 miles along the Moray Coast Trail, following an old railway line under stone-arched bridges, past gorse and small caves and the beaches at Cummingston roughly halfway. In the other direction Burghead Bay curves away to the south-west, long and sandy. At low tide it gives up a submerged forest — tree trunks, roots and branches in the peat, from when the sea stood much lower, around 7,000 years ago.

The headland is capped by the grassy ramparts of what was reputedly the largest Pictish fort in Scotland, the likely capital of Fortriu, occupied from the late 300s until Viking raiders burned it in the tenth century. When Telford's harbour was built in the early 1800s, up to thirty stone panels carved with bulls were dug out of the site. Most were built into the quay wall and lost, but six survive, two of them in the visitor centre.

The Clavie burns

Every 11 January a tar-filled barrel is set alight at 6pm on Granary Street and carried clockwise through the old town on the shoulders of the Clavie Crew — about fifteen men, all native-born Brochers — then left to burn out on a stone altar on Doorie Hill. Embers are gathered and posted to exiled Brochers around the world. It has been cancelled twice in living memory, in 1945 and 2020. "We've kept it pure despite the pressures of the modern world," says the Clavie King, Dan Ralph.

Malt, rail and village memory

The maltings on the edge of town turn out around 85,000 tonnes of malted barley a year, roughly a fifth of Scotland's output. The nearest trains are at Elgin, nine miles off on the Aberdeen–Inverness line, with the Stagecoach 32 in via Duffus. The primary school on Grant Street has three houses, named Clavie, St Aethans and Torfness.