The cottages along the waterfront stand end-on to the sea, turned sideways so the weather takes a gable rather than a front door. Behind them narrow lanes climb from the harbour towards wooded Ormond Hill and the farmland above. This is Avoch, on the south-east shore of the Black Isle, gathered around a harbour on the Moray Firth. The name is pronounced "Och."
The harbour was built by Thomas Telford between 1813 and 1815 and extended in concrete by the engineer James Fraser in 1904. It is Category B listed.
For food you are dealing mainly in takeaways. Harbour Fish & Chips at 32 High Street does fish and chips alongside smoked battered sausage, white pudding, macaroni-cheese bites, kebabs and Turkish baklava, with a vegan "tofish" for anyone who wants it. Gabis Tandoori on Rose Street handles the Indian end of things, and Happy Garden covers Chinese — seafood, duck and noodles. The Scotmid Co-op at 37 High Street is the grocery, and the post office two doors along at number 35 does the mail, everyday banking, bill payments, vehicle tax and euro travel money, which is worth knowing if you are self-catering.
Provisions, then, are close at hand, but there is no pub. The Station Hotel on Bridge Street ran as a pub, restaurant and eight-room hotel until it closed for good in July 2020. The Stagecoach buses that pass through — services 26, 26A and 126, linking Avoch with Inverness, Fortrose and Cromarty, weekends included — still call the stop "Avoch, Station Hotel."
The parish church stands above the village, red sandstone and Gothic, designed by Alexander Ross and built in 1870–72 on the site of a church of 1670 and probably older ones before that. It has a broached steeple, carved beasts beside the doorway and a west window by Barnett of Newcastle; inside are the original red-pine fittings and a braced collar roof. The vestry holds a pre-Reformation Sacrament House carved with a chalice. The building is now up for sale, though the graveyard stays in council hands.
A documented walk is the Ormond Castle circular, three miles and about an hour and a half, starting from the seafront at the south end of the village. It climbs through sheltered lanes and tree-lined track, overlooks Avoch Bay and the Moray Firth, and comes back through farmland with views towards the wader-rich Munlochy Bay. There is one short, steeper pull up to the castle mound, where little survives beyond turf-covered foundations laid out in three courts. In the thirteenth century this was the seat of the de Moravia family. Andrew de Moray raised his standard here before marching south to fight beside William Wallace; he was mortally wounded at Stirling Bridge in 1297. Local tradition says the castle's stone was later carried off for Cromwell's fort at Inverness.
A gentler alternative is the signed path along the old railway between Avoch and Fortrose, which runs through woods above the A832 with the firth in view.
West of the village lay Rosehaugh, a mansion remodelled between 1898 and 1903 for James Douglas Fletcher in a ten-year programme that cost £250,000, then pulled down in 1959. Its terraces, avenues and estate buildings survive on the south-facing slopes. The Avoch Burn, quieter now, once turned three corn mills and a woollen carding mill.
For a wider day out, Fortrose Cathedral is a short way east along the A832, its oldest ruins dating from 1214–49, with the canopied tomb of Euphemia, Countess of Ross, in the south aisle she added. Chanonry Point beyond it is one of the better places in Scotland to watch bottlenose dolphins, tide and luck permitting. The Fairy Glen at Rosemarkie is a woodland walk up to two waterfalls, steep and slippery towards the end. Inverness is the practical nearest railhead, about twelve and a half miles south.
For the children there is the Parkie in Park Street, a play area with a swing park beside it, and Coronation Park, whose football field opened in 1954 before a crowd of around three thousand. In the old bowling pavilion someone has kept a photograph of every Avoch Herring Queen since 1953, one for each year, lined up in order.