St Margaret's Hope

Seafood and the Harbour Front

The family that owns the Murray Arms runs four scallop diving boats, which is why the seafood restaurant on Cromarty Square can put down lobster and crab landed the same day. The motto is "seafood as fresh as it gets," which, given the fleet parked in the bay, is a statement of logistics rather than ambition. The bar is the hub of the village, with six letting rooms above and a garden and terrace at the back. Rosalind Erskine, food and drink editor at The Scotsman, called it "a local that you'd be happy to visit again and again."

Down on the harbour front, the Bellevue Inn overlooks the sheltered bay, and the village keeps a wine bar as well. Robertson's Coffee House does soups and locally sourced food from a building that used to sell coal and farming goods. There is a general store, a café, and that is more or less the working list.

From Herring Port to Listening Walk

It was not always this short. Within living memory St Margaret's Hope had around twenty-six shops: Leith's the drapers, Tom Hocker's shoe shop, Mackenzie's the jeweller and watchmaker, Doull's bakery with its delivery van, George Sinclair the bookseller. Two banks came and went; the Union Bank branch closed in 1966. The village grew from the early 1800s as a herring port, seasons running six or eight weeks before the boats moved on, and it became the commercial centre for Orkney's South Isles. Three salmon farms work the waters now.

The village climbs in tiers of stone houses from a working harbour with a boatyard and slipway. The best way to take it in is the Listening Walk, a heritage trail of twenty stops with QR codes that play recorded local voices, put together by the artist Sheena Graham-George. The flat first section covers eleven stops; the upper ones involve steps and steep hills. A short way out lies the Sands of Wright, a sandy bay that hosts the village's oddest and oldest tradition. On the third Saturday of August children in elaborate horse-harness costumes parade for the Festival of the Horse while boys plough miniature furrows in the sand. It has been going for at least two hundred years and happens nowhere else.

The Hall and the Smiddy

Cromarty Hall, given to the village in 1878 by William Cromarty, still does the heavy communal lifting: dances, pantomimes, a secondhand bookshop, the Repair Café, the "Bite and Blether" free lunch, and cinema nights billed as Screen on the Square. The Smiddy Museum keeps the old blacksmith's tools. There is a golf course, a bowling green and a tennis court.

Wartime Visitors and Ferry Links

Churchill is recorded here twice during the war, once talking to the shopkeeper Herbert Mackenzie on Front Road and once sheltering for tea and a scone while he waited for the ferry. That ferry still runs: Pentland Ferries takes catamarans from the pier three times a day across the Pentland Firth to Gills Bay. Kirkwall is about thirteen miles north up the A961, over the four Churchill Barriers with their rusting blockships in the sounds.

A Remembered Winter

Sledging down School Road into Cromarty Square is the sort of thing people here remember about winters.