Two crenellated stone beacons stand above the harbour at Berriedale, built in the early nineteenth century and lit to guide fishing boats home. They are called the Duke's Candlesticks, after the Duke of Portland. Below them the harbour has a narrow entrance, a small quay and a sheltered shingle beach where seals haul out and seabirds work the shallows. A tarred path of about four hundred metres runs down to the pier and the shore.
The village sits in a steep, wooded cleft where the Berriedale and Langwell Waters meet before running out to the North Sea. You arrive down the braes on the A9, and the drop into the valley is the first thing most people remember. Until 2020 the road did this by way of a hairpin so tight that opposing lorries could not comfortably pass; a new alignment opened that August and took the worst of it away. The steep sides and the river crossing remain.
On the north bank, just off the road, is the River Bothy — a tea room, deli, bakery and gift shop in one. One visitor called it "a gorgeous wee place to relax" and praised the range of sweet treats. It also does catering.
The walking is the reason to stay. Beyond the pier path, the Langwell Woodland route runs for nearly three kilometres through the strath, part tarred, part gravel and earth and grass. Two miles south, a short path leads through the ruins of Badbea, a Clearance settlement where Sir John Sinclair resettled twelve families after emptying the Berriedale straths in the 1790s. The last resident left in 1911. Its memorial was raised by Donald Sutherland, grandson of one of the people who had lived on the cliff.
A few miles further, at Ousdale, a two-kilometre path climbs to one of the best-preserved brochs in Caithness — walls still standing around three metres, a stairwell, two guard cells and a small wall cupboard intact. It passes the ruined clearance village of Borg and five interpretation panels. The path is gravel, downhill to the broch and uphill on the way back, pram-accessible but not wheelchair-accessible, with a bench or two for the climb and the steeper stretches turning wet after heavy rain.
The church stands closed to worship. Thomas Telford built it in 1826 as one of his standard Parliamentary churches, a plain T-plan with a bellcote and lattice windows. Plaques on the door credit James Horne of Langwell with the land and the Commissioners of Parliament with the building. The Church of Scotland gave it up in 2008, and a local association keeps it now. Its drystone burial ground holds tombs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
At the river mouth, on a tongue of rock, sit the scant remains of Berriedale Castle, first recorded in 1330-31 and handed down through the Cheyne, Sutherland, Oliphant and Sinclair families. Older still: when the road was improved, archaeologists found a seasonal camp from around 6000 BC, with flints, hearths and traces of shelter, some of the earliest evidence of people in Caithness.
The most human thing here belongs to the Shore Cottages, a salmon-fishing station of about 1840 that packed its catch in ice cut from the winter lochs and later stood empty for decades before the Landmark Trust restored it, floating the materials across the river on a cable barge. During an 1884 refit a joiner named Magnus Ganson wrote the date behind the panelling, and when the restorers lifted the floor they found a woman's worn shoe tucked underneath, perhaps hidden long ago as a charm against harm.