Cromarty

Two inns, one firth

The beach hut in the back garden of the Fishertown Inn sells Black Isle Dairy ice-cream cones. Inside is a Georgian pub with a snug and a dining room, run by Pete and Ingrid Rochford. A recent evening menu ran to Cromarty beer-battered haddock and chips with minted or mushy peas and homemade tartare sauce, smoked-mackerel pâté, a venison burger with caramelised red onion, and a Thai-spiced plant-based burger, with sticky toffee pudding after. Well-behaved dogs on leads are given water and treats, the beers come from Cromarty Brewing Company and Black Isle Brewery, and there is live music every second Thursday. Peter Irvine, in Scotland the Best, called it a "Bloody Good Pub."

Down on the shore, the Royal Hotel keeps a bar with a log fire, a conservatory and sea-front tables looking over the harbour to the Cromarty Firth. The kitchen serves Cullen skink with Cromarty Bakery bread, a beef burger built up with Fraser Bros black pudding, Kintyre Applewood smoked cheese and chilli jam, pan-fried North Sea cod with mango, lime and coriander salsa, and a butternut-squash Wellington. Happy Chappy from Cromarty Brewing and Black Isle Blonde are on draft. The building was a merchant's house before it became an inn by 1825; in 1899 Andrew Carnegie arrived at its door by fishing boat, stranded after his steam yacht broke down off Balintore.

Harbour pizza and provisions

Sutor Creek, on the harbour, cooks pizzas in a wood-fired oven. One, The Stoltman, was made for the strongman brothers Luke and Tom Stoltman and piles on black pudding, venison salami, chicken, shredded pork, bacon and buffalo mozzarella, with a donation to the RNLI from every sale. The open kitchen means dogs wait outside by the water bowl. For provisions there is the Cromarty Bakery on Bank Street, with filled rolls, pies and soup, and Cromarty Stores a few doors along, a general shop with an outdoor cash machine.

Fishertown, Georgian streets and Hugh Miller

The town is two things at once. There are the narrow lanes of Fishertown, once home to an oral fishing dialect that blended Highland Scots with Norse, Gaelic and Doric influence, and there are the Georgian streets George Ross drove the rebuilding of after 1768, funding the courthouse and harbour and later building Cromarty House. The courthouse and its old jail are now a museum. Next door stands the thatched cottage where Hugh Miller was born in 1802, a stonemason who found his first fossil at seventeen and went on to write about the fish beds of the Old Red Sandstone; it belongs to the National Trust for Scotland now. Miller carved some of the memorials in the graveyard of the East Church, an early-17th-century building whose interior still has long nails driven into the wood as hat pegs.

Up to the South Sutor

The best walk climbs from the town to the South Sutor, four miles round with a steep pull up through woodland to the viewpoint. From the top the firth opens out towards Nigg and the oil rigs serviced at Invergordon, and bottlenose dolphins sometimes surface below, though they keep their own schedule. EcoVentures runs wildlife trips from the harbour in a RIB called Saorsa, skippered by Sarah.

Rails, ferries and shoemaker giants

There is no railway station; Dingwall is about twenty miles by road and Inverness twenty-five, the latter with a direct Stagecoach 26A bus. In summer the small ferry across to Nigg saves the long drive around the firth, though it is worth checking sailing times before you go. The two headlands guarding the entrance are the Sutors, and the old story makes them shoemaker giants who threw their tools back and forth across the water. On a still evening, with a cone from the pub garden, you can stand at the harbour and watch for them.