Golspie

The Duke Above the Shore

A hundred-foot statue of a duke stands on the hill behind the village, visible from the main street. The hill is Ben Bhraggie and the figure at the top is George Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland, whose part in the Highland Clearances keeps the monument argued over to this day. The stone was quarried locally and carried up in pieces by horse and cart. You can walk to it, a six-mile circuit from Fountain Road, about four hours and 396 metres of climbing through forest onto upland moor, with the east Sutherland coast laid out below and, on a clear day, a view most of the way across Scotland.

Golspie sits between the hill and the sea, a historic fishing village strung along the A9 on the North Coast 500. A three-mile sandy beach runs the length of it.

Coaching Inns and Quick Suppers

For food, the Golspie Inn occupies a coaching inn dating back more than two centuries, with decking and a covered area out front. The kitchen serves Cullen skink, homemade steak pie with mash, battered haddock and peas, lasagne, gammon, burgers and sticky toffee pudding. The bar promotes Clynelish, a malt distilled about ten minutes away. The Stags Head Hotel stands on Main Street.

Capaldi's Wee Pink Shop offers up to twenty-two dairy ice-cream flavours, plus dairy-free choices and sorbets.

Gorge Paths and Outdoor Play

Behind the village, the Big Burn walk threads a wooded gorge past a waterfall and a run of small bridges. Golspie also sits on the John o' Groats Trail, the coastal path between Inverness and John o' Groats, with a stretch running north to Brora.

Golspie offers a great deal for a place this size: it has two refurbished play parks, including one with a wheelchair-accessible jeep, plus a 25-metre swimming pool with sauna and steam rooms, tennis courts, games pitches and an outdoor gym by the beach car park. The Highland Wildcat mountain-bike trails run from a gentle 0.9-kilometre loop to a 13.6-kilometre black route, laid out by Pete Laing, who built the first trails at Glentress. The golf club's eighteen holes, shaped with a hand from James Braid, take in sea and mountain.

Church, Fishertown and the Wider Coast

St Andrew's, the parish church, began as a Sutherland family chapel in the thirteenth century and was rebuilt in the 1730s. Inside are a canopied pulpit of 1738 and the laird's loft of 1739, both carved by Kenneth Sutherland, the carpenter at Dunrobin, and a bell first cast in 1696 and recast in 1728. Down on Shore Street, Fishertown was the fishing community's heart until most of it was pulled down in the 1970s; mosaics along the front now mark what stood there. Before the pier opened in 1895, women waded into deep water carrying their husbands and the nets out to the boats.

A mile north, Dunrobin Castle rises above formal gardens, the seat of the Earls and Dukes of Sutherland, with fabric dating back to about 1275, a Victorian museum and seasonal falconry displays. Three miles south, Loch Fleet spreads into a tidal basin where seals haul out on the sandbanks and ospreys fish. The station on Station Road is unstaffed but step-free, with a handful of parking spaces, and the Stagecoach X99 runs the coast between Inverness and Thurso.

The Fishermen's Hall

The recreation hall that Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, commissioned for local fishermen in 1896 still stands at the shore. It now houses Golspie Heritage Society, with exhibitions and a collection devoted to local history.