Jemimaville

Kirkmichael and Jemimaville's beginnings

Kirkmichael stands at the edge of Udale Bay, a repaired medieval church and its burial ground looking out over the mudflats towards the Sutor headlands. Inside, sheltered from the weather, are pre-Reformation grave slabs carved with crosses. One of them, the Kirkmichael Tree Cross, sets a Christian cross among fleur-de-lis-tipped branches that merge into a tree of life. Two slabs too worn to move have been recreated as they may have looked five hundred years ago. Archaeologists working here recorded twenty ledger slabs from the 17th and 18th centuries, three of them carved with claymores, and turned up a flint arrowhead that seems to have arrived by accident in grave-digging spoil.

The village itself sits on the B9163, along the northern shore of the Black Isle. George Gun Munro of Poyntzfield laid it out in 1822 as a place for tradespeople to live, and named it for his wife, Jamima Charlotte Graham, whom he married the same year. Early records spell it Jamima-Ville.

From the vanished inn to Cromarty tables

These days there's no pub in the village and no shop, so it's worth checking what's currently available before you rely on either. The Poyntzfield Arms, also called the Plough, closed at the end of the First World War, when its licence was bought out under wartime restrictions around the Cromarty Firth because of the armed-services presence. Charles Grant Mackay was keeping the inn by 1886. In 1883 the estate's tenants had gathered there to toast the Poyntzfield heir with wine and cake, with flags and illuminations around the village.

For food you drive east to Cromarty, along the shore of the firth. The Royal Hotel does Cullen skink with bread from Cromarty Bakery, Fraser Bros haggis loaded fries, and a beef burger built with Fraser Bros black pudding, Kintyre smoked cheese and chilli jam; the hotel dog, Ellie, is on a low-fat diet, and the menu asks you not to feed her. Sutor Creek, down by the harbour, cooks Scottish seafood and pizzas in a wood-fired oven; dogs stay outside, where there are ties and a water bowl, because the kitchen is open to the room.

Birds, paths and firth views

What brings people to Jemimaville is the bay. Udale Bay is an RSPB reserve of mudflat, saltmarsh and wet grassland, with a hide, a nature trail and a viewing screen near Kirkmichael. Wigeon gather in large flocks to feed on the eelgrass, ospreys fish the shallows, and the managed grassland holds lapwing, snipe and redshank. There are four small car parks and no toilets; the nearest are in Cromarty. From 1 April to 15 August, while birds are nesting on the ground, dogs need to be on a short lead.

The walking is quiet and close to the water. A signposted core-path network links Jemimaville and Cullicudden, and from Cromarty a 4.4-mile circular climbs to the South Sutor and the coastal rock feature called McFarquhar's Bed. Along the Newhall Point road the view takes in Invergordon and the oil rigs standing out in the firth, wetland and working estuary in the same glance.

Literary lives and ways to arrive

History sits lightly here. The novelist Jane Duncan, who wrote as Elizabeth Jane Cameron, drew places and people from the parish for her My Friends books. The Old Free Church Manse, from about 1845, is where Rev Donald Sage wrote and died, the author of Memorabilia Domestica. Behind Poyntzfield House stood a corn mill and a flour mill, both water-powered, the flour mill carrying a cross on its gable. On the bank of the Udale Burn there is an ice-house, sunk into the ground, where salmon were once packed in ice for the journey to markets in the south.

Buses come through. Some Stagecoach 26 journeys between Cromarty and Inverness stop at the old post office, and the Highland Council 21C, 21F and 121 run to Dingwall on weekdays, though the timetable is thin and worth checking before you rely on it.

The bay at day's end

The salmon trade has gone from the burn, but the birds still come in off the firth, and from the kirkyard wall you can watch them settle onto the flats as the light goes off the water.