Brora

Station Square flavours

Station Square holds an Indian restaurant, a chocolate shop and the railway platform. Sid's Spice cooks home-style food from the Sylhet region of Bangladesh, a recipe line that runs through the owner's mother and sister; The Herald once ranked it the second-best Indian restaurant in Scotland, and it was a finalist at the 2023 Scottish Restaurant Awards. A few doors along, Cocoa Skye has been making chocolates, cakes and waffles in London House since 2019, and will sell you coffee beans and hot chocolate to take away. It is dog friendly, though it's worth checking on the day if you want to bring one inside.

The Sutherland Inn has been putting up travellers since 1818. Downstairs there is a bar with a pool table and a jukebox; upstairs is quieter, with a long collection of malt whisky behind it. The kitchen does breaded scampi with home-cut chips, local sausages and mash, and Sunday roasts. Well-behaved dogs are allowed, though it's worth checking when you book.

Inns, flies and ice cream

At the Royal Marine Hotel, the Megan Boyd Bar is named after a Brora woman who dressed salmon flies for a living and did it well enough that her clients included Prince Charles. Her photograph and story are on the wall, and the cocktails are named after her flies. Forty-seven of them sold for £22,000 in 2018; her life became a film, Kiss the Water. The hotel's Curing Yard restaurant serves oysters, seared medallion of loch trout and Highland lamb, its name a nod to the fish-curing yards that once worked the shore.

For ice cream, Capaldi's has been part of the village since Bernardo Capaldi opened his parlour in 1929.

Shore and paths

Brora sits where the River Brora reaches the Moray Firth, around a small tidal harbour and a sandy beach backed by shell-sand links. Sea pinks and bird's-foot trefoil grow on the grass; seals, otters, waders and Arctic terns may be seen around the shore. On a clear day you can see across the Dornoch Firth to the Tarbat peninsula, north to the Ord of Caithness, and inland to the Duke of Sutherland's monument on Ben Bhraggie.

The Brora Village Trail is a circular walk of under two miles, about an hour, with seven interpretation boards covering the harbour, the back shore and the riverbank. Longer, the coast path to Golspie runs just under seven miles along dunes and field edges, past a shore waterfall at Sputie Burn, the roughly 2,000-year-old double-walled broch at Carn Liath and Dunrobin Castle, with oystercatchers on the beach. Both ends are served by rail, so you can walk it one way and take the train back. The A9 runs straight through the village, and there is a central car park with public toilets and electric-car charging.

Coal, harbour and golf

Brora made things. Coal was found here in 1529, and from 1814 the village ran the most northerly coal mine in Britain, feeding brick kilns, a woollen mill and salt pans, and lighting its streets by electricity early; the mine closed in 1974. The harbour once held a lemonade factory, a boatbuilder's slipway and three herring-curing stations. Lobster is the main catch now.

Golf arrived in 1891. Brora Golf Club is an 18-hole links laid out to a James Braid design, its clubhouse looking over the course. Tom Watson, who has won five Opens, called it "a wonderful links golf course. I had a very difficult time with it."

Stone and fossil

The war-memorial clock tower is built of local Clynelish sandstone, with an ammonite fossil set into its base.