A ten-foot mermaid stands on a boulder off the shore at Balintore, easiest to reach when the tide is out. She is the Mermaid of the North, made by the Hilton sculptor Steve Hayward for the 2007 Highland Year of Culture. A storm damaged the first one in 2012, and a bronze cast took her place in 2014. Local folklore tells of a fisherman who hid a mermaid's tail to keep her as his wife; when she found it and went back to the sea, she carried on bringing fish to her hungry children.
She sits on Clach Dhubh, the erratic boulder the old surveyors called the Black Stone. From the Seaboard Centre car park it is about three hundred yards along the shore path to reach her, and the same path carries on either way — north to Hilton of Cadboll, south to Shandwick Bay.
Balintore is the middle of three villages strung along this stretch of the Moray Firth coast, facing east over the water with farmland rolling down the peninsula behind. The harbour, built between 1890 and 1896, is still the thing your eye goes to. Before the fishing, this was Port an Ab, the Abbot's Port, held by Fearn Abbey; the road only reached inland to Hill of Fearn in 1819.
The Seaboard Centre, in the memorial hall facing the firth, is where the village gathers. Its café does breakfasts, snacks and lunches, with home baking and provision for gluten-free and vegan eaters. People who have eaten there mention tomato soup, macaroni cheese, and beer-battered haddock with chips and peas, though the kitchen works to what the day brings rather than a fixed card. One visitor found it full of local people. Dogs stay outside unless they are guide dogs, and there is seating for them out there. The same building holds a community-run gift shop and post office counter, a children's playpark and a tennis court, with free parking, public toilets and baby-changing.
Inside, the centre keeps the original carved base of the Hilton of Cadboll stone, a Pictish slab whose long spell underground left its interlace and beast carvings unusually sharp. A full-size replica stands back at the original spot above Hilton.
For a walk with more in it, drive round to Shandwick and take the path to Tobar na Slàinte, the Well of Health — a little under two miles there and back, an hour or so, climbing above Shandwick Bay before a rough, worn track to the well itself. The old cure required you to silver the water with a coin and carry it there and back without speaking. Above the same shore stands the Shandwick Stone, a sandstone cross-slab close to three metres high, carved around the year 800 with angels, beasts, snakes and twenty-two human figures. It blew down and broke in 1846 and now shelters under glass.
Driving is simplest. The nearest station is Fearn, unstaffed, with a waiting room and cycle stands but no ticket machine or car park; the B9166 runs in from Hill of Fearn. Tain, ten kilometres to the north-west, is the town for anything larger, and Stagecoach's 124 bus runs once a day on schooldays only.
The United Free church on Park Street opened in December 1932. Its congregation had formed three years earlier, when seventy-seven members of the Nigg Chapelhill church declined to join the union with the Church of Scotland, and the fishermen, crofters, labourers and tradesmen among them pooled their skills to build the place themselves — Alex Skinner and David Vass raising the wall, Alex and Donald Duncan making the gates. "It seems a misnomer," Miss Ross wrote of those early days, "that we, who number upwards of 250, should be called the 'Minority'."