Culbokie

The Inn and Its State-Run Past

The Culbokie Inn keeps a pétanque pitch in its garden, laid out where the ground looks north across the Cromarty Firth. The kitchen cooks a modern version of Scottish food built around the Black Isle farms and the coast below: the haddock comes beer-battered in Cromarty Brewing's Happy Chappy, the scampi is whole-tail from Bannermans of Tain, and you can also order loch trout with hollandaise, a venison and red-wine stew, haggis bonbons, and a choice between an Ardgay venison burger and a Wagyu one. There is a Sunday roast and a board of daily specials. Dogs are welcome. "The craic is good in the bar," wrote one diner after a June 2026 lunch.

The building is thought to date from 1790, and for much of the twentieth century it was not the landlord's to run. It came under state control during the First World War and stayed inside the State Management District until 1972. In 1921 a sixty-foot hut called the Culbokie Canteen was put up to serve an influx of timber workers. In 1949 a proposal to fit a bathroom drew a village protest, because residents feared it would reduce the supply at the communal pump.

Village Shops and Producers

The village runs along a single road, the B9169, strung out where the ground breaks and falls steeply towards the firth. Open farmland still separates the clusters of houses, and coniferous forest closes off the views to the south and east. On Main Street the Culbokie Store is general shop, newsagent and Post Office in one, and stocks organic eggs and Cromarty Bakery bread.

Once a month the producers gather properly. On the third Saturday, Findon Hall fills with fish, meat, home baking, preserves and chocolate, alongside pottery, jewellery, woodcraft, plants and textiles; every Saturday a smaller outdoor market of fish and meat vans sets up at the Cairn car park. A couple of miles off at Tore, Black Isle Berries has grown soft fruit at Ryefield Farm for more than twenty-five years and sells its own berries, apples, tomatoes and apple juice beside local meat, venison and cheese. Its kitchen turns the farm's frozen fruit into brownies, gingerbread, meringues and fruit ice cream. In summer you can pick your own, availability permitting.

Woodland, Archaeology and Folklore

Walking starts from the door. A 3.4-mile circuit loops through Culbokie Wood, open and light underfoot, with red squirrels, spring flowers and a loch that draws ducks and herons; the Iron Age dun of Carn Mor lies nearby, a near-circular wall about thirty metres across, still legible after two thousand years. A longer route of just under five miles begins at the Post Office and follows the B9169 before entering Culbokie Wood. The John o'Groats Trail passes straight through, reaching Culbokie on its first stage out of Inverness and leaving on the second towards Alness, so walkers arrive on foot rather than treat the village only as a base. The woods also hold a permanent orienteering course laid out for beginners, and Findon Hall has an enclosed garden with play equipment, badminton nets and a table-tennis table.

The ground here is older than the pub by some way. About a kilometre south-west of the shop lies Teanagairn, a Neolithic henge — a circular platform some fifteen metres across, ringed by a ditch and outer bank — though it sits on private land and needs permission; Carn Mor, out on forestry ground, is the one to actually walk to. The village's Gaelic name, An Cùil Bhàicidh, is translated locally as "The Haunted Nook," and an 1845 account placed a fairy woman in the wooded gorge of the Findon Burn, where she was said to lure a named local man from his family for months, past "a fine cascade of about twenty feet." The only confirmed listed building is Alma Cottage and Beaufort, an early nineteenth-century former merchant's house and shop.

Church, Transport and Udale Bay

The church is a recent thing. In 2012 the Church of Scotland dedicated Culbokie's first proper church building in a former primary school; inside hangs a bell from Old Urquhart Church, which went out of use in 1792, carried down the years from one building to the next.

Getting here means the A9 and the Kessock Bridge from Inverness, then the signed turn, and the 408 bus makes the same journey on weekdays. By straight-line distance Dingwall is nearest, about 3.3 miles off; Conon Bridge, 4.9 miles away, is unstaffed but step-free with free parking. Dingwall, seven road miles away, is the town for shops and trains. East along the coast, the mudflats of RSPB Udale Bay bring in waders, geese and fishing ospreys, watched from a hide.

The Firth and Ben Wyvis

Findon Hall's garden has seating and a view. On a clear evening the firth lies below and Ben Wyvis stands across it, and that is the picture most people take home.