Dunnet

Distilling beside Dunnet Bay

The two copper stills at Dunnet Bay Distillers are called Elizabeth and Margaret, the first after the Queen Mother and the second after the founder's mother. Martin and Claire Murray started the place in 2014 and still make Rock Rose Gin and Holy Grass Vodka in 500-litre batches, hand-filling, wax-sealing, numbering and signing each bottle. A dog called Mr. Mackintosh has the run of the site now; an earlier dog, George, who saw the couple through their garage experiments before he died in 2016, is remembered here too. The company is also developing the old 19th-century Castletown Mill into a whisky distillery, a longer project.

That is a lot of activity for a village this far north. Dunnet sits beside Dunnet Bay, on the flat coast of Caithness, with the Dunnet Head peninsula rising to the north. The beach runs for more than two miles of white sand, and people come to it to paddle, swim, surf, windsurf and fly kite buggies, though it is worth checking conditions before you go in.

Local food and parish history

The Northern Sands Hotel is Dunnet's hotel restaurant and bar, which Martin Nicolson bought in 2016 and reopened after renovation the following year. The hotel reports that its restaurant, run by head chef Darren Munro, won Scottish Hotel Restaurant of the Year at the 2022 Food Awards Scotland. The kitchen leans on local produce, with a menu that has featured Cullen skink, venison terrine with pickled red onion and mushroom ketchup, hot-smoked trout with braised fennel, roast rump of local lamb, roast free-range chicken with haggis, Caithness sirloin and fillet steaks, Scrabster haddock and a Scrabster seafood pie. There is a bar, Logan's, and a lounge, Pentland's, and a beer garden where dogs are welcome, though not inside.

Dunnet Parish Church is a simple T-plan building with a squat west tower that probably went up in the 17th or early 18th century, and a north aisle added in 1837. It is Category A listed. Inside are the 1837 box pews and a memorial to Rev. Timothy Pont, minister here from 1601 to 1610 and an early Scottish cartographer. The communion table remembers George Calder, an RAF Volunteer Reserve pilot killed in 1942; the font remembers Jimmie Swanson, lost in the 1969 Longhope lifeboat disaster. The walled burial ground holds tombs from the 17th to 20th centuries.

Forest trails and the headland circuit

For walking, the softest option is Dunnet Community Forest, where a hard-surfaced red trail suits most abilities and a yellow trail has seating every 300 to 400 metres. There are five ponds, a bird hide, an orienteering course and, for children, a Dino Trail, a pirate ship, a giant xylophone and a sculpture trail. The serious walk is the Dunnet Head circuit from Dwarwick Pier: 10.5 miles, five and a half to six and a half hours, over narrow heather paths, bog and unprotected cliff edges. It is worth the effort in summer for the puffins, guillemots, fulmars, razorbills and kittiwakes on the sandstone cliffs, and for the view across the Pentland Firth to Hoy and the Old Man of Hoy.

Mainland Britain's northern edge

Dunnet Head itself, about four miles up the B855, is the northernmost point of mainland Britain. Robert Stevenson's lighthouse of 1831 stands there on a cliff, and the RSPB, which manages the reserve, calls the ground around it a "wild and untamed landscape." There is no way into the tower, but a firm path leads to a step-free viewpoint at the top.

Arrivals and crofting memory

Getting here means the A836 from Thurso, seven miles off and the nearest railway station, or the Stagecoach service 80, which stops beside the village telephone kiosk on its way between Thurso and John o' Groats. A mile out, near Dwarwick Pier, Mary-Ann's Cottage is preserved much as Mary-Ann Calder lived in it, a croft where she cooked over a peat range and lived until she was 89.