Canisbay

Upper Gills and John o' Groats food

About 1.9 miles straight line west of Canisbay, Annie's Bakery at Upper Gills does bread and rolls, sausage rolls, pies and pastries, cakes and traybakes, and a lunch that runs to soup, sandwiches, salads, baked potatoes, a Fisherman's Lunch and children's lunch boxes. What is on the counter changes from day to day. For a sit-down meal, one option about 2.1 miles straight line from Canisbay is Café Groats in John o' Groats, which serves locally caught seafood and home-cooked food beside the signpost, indoors or out, and Andrew's team are happy to have the dog.

St Drostan's and the broch mound

Canisbay itself is a small settlement on the A836, twenty miles east of Thurso, strung along the edge of the Pentland Firth with Stroma and Orkney across the water. The parish church stands at its centre. Canisbay Parish Church — St Drostan's — is a harled cruciform kirk with a pre-Reformation west tower, Category A listed, its origins documented between 1223 and 1245. The present building was largely rebuilt in the seventeenth century and carries the dates 1720 and 1724; inside are east and west galleries, a panelled Victorian pulpit and the former Sinclair of Mey heritors' gallery. Set into the entrance porch is the Groat family mural tomb, made in 1568 and later recut by the Caithness sculptor John Nicolson of Nybster.

The church stands on a mound that covers the ruins of a broch. Red-deer antler and hammerstones turned up in the graveyard and were sent to the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland in 1871 by the minister, the Rev James MacPherson.

The Castle of Mey connection

For almost fifty summers the Queen Mother worshipped at St Drostan's while staying at the Castle of Mey, about 3.8 miles straight line west of Canisbay, and King Charles III continued the connection. The 16th-century Z-plan building rises above the firth in the same parish, with gun slits, corbelled turrets and a twelve-foot wall shielding the gardens from gales and salt spray. It is the most northerly inhabited castle on mainland Britain, with a visitor centre, an animal centre and walled gardens to explore.

Coastal walking and local links

The walking here is coastal and exposed. The circuit from John o' Groats round Duncansby Head runs about five and a quarter miles over grassy clifftop, boggy in places, past Sannick Bay, the Glupe blowhole, the lighthouse and the two great Stacks of Duncansby, where seabirds nest. The Northern Pilgrims' Way comes through Gills to the church and on through Huna, and the 147-mile John o' Groats Trail from Inverness finishes at John o' Groats. Stagecoach service 80 stops at Canisbay Hall and runs west through Mey, Dunnet and Castletown to Thurso; the nearest train is at Wick.

The Jan de Groot tradition

By tradition a Dutch ferryman named Jan de Groot, who ran the crossing to Orkney, built himself a house with eight doors and an eight-sided table, so that none of his seven descendants could claim the head of it. His tombstone is said to lie in the church porch.