Lossiemouth

Harbour Pubs

The boats moored in the East Basin are yachts now. Around 78 berths sit where skaffies and steam drifters once tied up, and the pubs along Pitgaveny Street look out over a marina rather than a working fleet. The Steamboat, at number 15, overlooks the harbour and puts on live music at weekends from around nine. It's dog friendly, over-18s, and one reviewer settles on the word cosy, calling it "a very nice cosy pub down by Lossiemouth harbour."

The Brander Arms is the other harbour pub, a small one by the marina with covered seating outside. A TripAdvisor reviewer notes that "real fuss is made of the dogs," which tells you most of what you need to know about the place.

From Firthside Food to East Beach

Up on Stotfield Road, the Skerry Brae Hotel sits above the Old Moray golf course looking out across the firth. It serves British and Scottish food — fish, beef, chicken — lunch and dinner daily, with a beer terrace for the days that allow it. The Beach Bar at the western end is larger than its name suggests and does good pub grub. For a coffee and cake, Twenty Nineteen is the café near the lighthouse.

The town has two beaches, and they are not the same beach. East Beach is long golden sand backed by dunes, reached by a footbridge over the River Lossie. The old wooden one, past a hundred years old, failed and closed in 2019; its replacement opened in 2022. The dunes behind it were put there on purpose in the early 1900s, using disused railway carriages, to stop the sea reaching Seatown. Surfers use the beach year-round — one of the few surf spots north of Aberdeen.

West Beach and the Lost Railway

West Beach is wilder: three miles of sand, rockpools, cliffs and caves, best walked at low tide out towards Covesea Lighthouse. The Moray Coast Trail runs six flat miles east from Hopeman past coves and caves, and most of the closed Elgin–Lossiemouth branch line is now a footpath.

That line was the first to close under the Beeching Axe, in April 1964. There's no station now; the nearest is Elgin, six miles away, with Stagecoach buses 33A and 33C making the run every half hour in about eighteen minutes.

Ramsay MacDonald and Moray Golf Club

Lossiemouth's most famous son was born at 1 Gregory Place in 1866 — James Ramsay MacDonald, Britain's first Labour Prime Minister, the illegitimate son of a housemaid. In 1916 the Moray Golf Club expelled him for his anti-war views, by a vote of 73 to 24. When the club voted him back in 1929, he refused, had the expulsion letter framed, and joined the club at Spey Bay instead.

St Gerardine's Lanterns

The town's oldest story belongs to St Gerardine, an Irish hermit said to have lived in a cave here, raising lanterns to warn ships off the rocks. Each year hundreds of children carry lanterns from the war memorial up to St Gerardine's Church in his memory, a small procession of light for a saint who spent his nights doing much the same thing.