Halkirk

River Thurso on the Menu

The restaurant Beat 4 takes its name from the salmon-fishing beat opposite. Inside, the library keeps an honours board recording who opened the River Thurso each season and the weight of the first and heaviest fish landed. Head chef Craig Brown's menu runs to Ulbster Cullen skink, a Highland venison burger with Strathdon blue and caramelised onion, dry-aged Scottish sirloin and rib-eye, and roast monkfish when it is the catch of the day. Sticky toffee pudding and a Scottish cheeseboard close it out. The Lounge Bar is the informal end of the hotel, with a carved fireplace from a Dutch galleon, and the garden behind has wooden picnic benches in a sheltered position.

The Ulbster Arms serves locally produced spirits, including whiskies from Old Pulteney and Wolfburn, gin and rum from North Point Distillery, and gin and vodka from Dunnet Bay Distillers. Gin and whisky flights are available.

Pub and Provisions

The Halkirk Comm on Bridge Street has darts, pool and live music.

Provisions are straightforward. The Morrisons Daily on Sinclair Street covers the basics: hot drinks, sandwiches, newspapers, an off-licence and a cash machine. For something better, Cairn Hill Butchery sits just off the A9 at Achingills Farm, Sordale, between Halkirk and Thurso. It is an on-farm butchery selling organic, grass-fed beef from its own Dexter and Highland cattle, which graze the hill ground around Loch Stemster and Loch Rangag. You can buy at the farm or arrange collection.

The Planned Village and Its Churches

The village was drawn to a plan. Sir John Sinclair set out the grid in 1803, south of his bridge, with one-acre plots, a square of streets and shared wells; two of the old metal water pumps still stand on Bridge Street. The River Thurso runs alongside, and a 1.4-kilometre gravel path follows it. A shorter track leads to Braal Castle, a ruined fourteenth-century tower on an earlier Norse castle site and once the principal seat of the Earls of Caithness. Further out, tracks climb Ben Dorrery and reach Loch Calder for anyone wanting more ground under their feet.

Two churches mark the village's ages. The parish church on Bridge Street, designed by Alexander Ross of Inverness and opened in 1886 as a Free Church, has an Italian Romanesque west front, a large wheel window and a square tower with a pyramidal slate roof; the tower was still unfinished when the doors first opened. The older parish church, built in 1753, no longer holds services. Its walled burial ground is packed tight with table and upright tombs, and a birdcage bellcote with an ogee cap sits above the harled walls.

Bridge, Routes and Fossils

The 1731 bridge over the Thurso, paid for by John Sinclair of Ulbster, carried a local belief that the devil waited beneath its arches after dark. When it was replaced in 1970, the mason William Shearer's long inscription was saved and copied onto the new bridge in Caithness flagstone.

Getting here means the A9 and the B874 through the village. The nearest railway is Georgemas Junction, step-free but unstaffed, off the A9 near Halkirk, and Thurso and its coast are about eleven minutes away by car. A few miles further, Achanarras is a former quarry famous for fossil fish from a lake that existed here around 380 million years ago.

Highland Games and the Grid

On the last Saturday of July the village fills for the Halkirk Highland Games, held at Recreation Park since 1921. The heavy events have history: in 1998 and 1999 the Australian Matt Sandford broke three world records here, and at the 2003 centenary he pulled an MG Rover 75 hand over hand across the field in 20.2 seconds. The old pumps on Bridge Street remain reminders of Sinclair's square grid, one-acre plots and communal wells.