The low concrete blocks of Balnakeil Craft Village were put up in the mid-1950s as a Ministry of Defence early-warning station against nuclear attack, and never commissioned. They stand about a mile west of Durness, and behind their utilitarian doors now sit a chocolatier, a glassmaker, a woodturner, a ceramicist and a gallery of paintings of the coast just outside.
Nicola Poole's Wee Gallery hangs oil and acrylic paintings and prints of the surrounding landscape. Ludo's Woodwind Workshop repairs instruments and turns large bowls and candlesticks. Mudness Ceramics makes pottery alongside hand-painted silk scarves and peg-loom rugs, and Lesley Smith's Balnakeil Glass works in stained and fused glass, beads and jewellery. Cocoa Mountain, started here in 2006, makes handmade truffles, shards and bars and its own hot chocolate, with dairy-free and alcohol-free lines among them. In another of the units the geologist Björn Hardarson runs Durness Deep Time, an exhibition on the area's rock and archaeology, and leads tailored walks.
The camp began its second life in 1964, when the abandoned shells were taken on by settlers who found them without plumbing or electricity. The International Voluntary Service put up the poles and cables, and Paul and Yvette Brown opened a coffee shop and pottery and ran the first commercial transport out to Cape Wrath. By 1980 Highland Regional Council had sold the units to their sitting tenants, sixteen businesses by then, and the village still describes itself as the only craft village in Britain owned by its residents. A BBC documentary, The Road to Balnakeil, filmed the place in 1974.
Past the craft village the road runs down to the beach. Balnakeil sits at the start of a broad white-sand bay backed by high dunes on Faraid Head, with the sea reaching west towards Cape Wrath. The Faraid Head circuit begins at the car park beside the ruined church: about four miles, an hour and a half to two hours, crossing the sand, following the old military access road up onto the dunes, and reaching cliff views at the head. There are nesting seabirds, puffins in early summer, and grey seals below. At low tide you can walk back along the sand between the beaches, which is worth timing.
The golf is at Balnakeil too. Durness Golf Club is nine links holes played as eighteen from different tees, the most north-westerly mainland course in Britain, with clubs and buggies for hire and visitors welcome.
Durness Old Church is a roofless T-plan ruin with crow-stepped gables, an east-gable belfry, moulded doorways and a four-light aisle window; it is thought to have been built in 1619, gained a north aisle in 1692, and stood in use until about 1814. Set into the wall is a mural tomb of 1619 to Duncan MacMorroch, who by tradition was buried within the fabric rather than inside the church because of his dubious service to his master.
For eating and drinking you generally head back into Durness, where the Smoo Cave Hotel bar takes non-residents and keeps a pool table, darts, a sports screen and local Orkney ales. The single-track road is the way in and out; there is no railway close by, but the 806 bus runs from Balnakeil to the station at Lairg on the Far North Line a few days a week, and a bookable dial-a-bus covers Keoldale, Balnakeil and Laid on weekdays. Smoo Cave, with its waterfall chamber reached by a free public walkway, and the Keoldale ferry across to the Cape Wrath minibus are both a short way off.
Ishbel Macdonald has lived and worked in Balnakeil for more than thirty years. "I'm still proud to call the Craft Village my home," she says.