Keiss

Harbour history and Sinclair's Bay

The main street drops downhill to a small stone harbour, and if the harbour looks familiar you may have seen it on television. In 2019 it stood in for Mullaghmore in an episode of The Crown, the sequence in which Lord Mountbatten sets off to go fishing. It is a working basin walled in rubble, with some of its masonry set deliberately on end. A Keiss-born harbour engineer, James Bremner, built it in the 1820s, orienting the rocks to take the weight of heavy waves. The harbour dates to 1831 and has an inner stilling basin and a three-storey warehouse of about the same date. Both harbour and warehouse are Category A listed.

Keiss sits on Sinclair's Bay, and the best way to understand where you are is to climb the brae above the harbour. From the top the whole bay opens out, with Noss Head lighthouse, Castle Sinclair Girnigoe and Ackergill Tower ranged along the far shore. Paths run down to the water and along the sand through pasture and dune. The name is Norse for "ridge."

Seafood and village essentials

The village pub is the Village Inn at the Sinclair Bay Hotel, with a public bar, a lounge and rooms upstairs. Seafood and pub standards make up the food offer, with one changing cask beer; pool and darts round out the stop.

For groceries the picture is thinner. There is no bakery, butcher or grocer in the village, though an outreach Post Office runs from the Community Hall, opened in the spring of 2025. If you are self-catering, plan to bring the bulk of what you need or drive to Wick.

Telford's church and the Iron Age shore

The parish church stands plainly in the village. Thomas Telford built it in 1827 as one of his standard Parliamentary churches, a T-plan design with harled walls, cast-iron Y-tracery in the windows and a birdcage bellcote on top. Inside are plain pews and an octagonal pulpit. In the vestibule is a carved memorial to Sir Francis Tress Barry, the work of John Nicolson of Nybster, moved here from Keiss Castle.

Tress Barry excavated the brochs that stand along the shore, Iron Age drystone towers built in the first centuries BC and AD and reused generations later. From Keiss Broch his digs turned up Roman pottery, a bronze-working crucible, a bone comb, red-deer antlers and the bones of the Great Auk. Whitegate Broch sits about a hundred metres north, now ruinous and overgrown.

The castle walk and onward connections

The walk that takes all this in starts from Nybster Broch car park, three miles up the road, and runs about five and a half kilometres there and back, roughly two and a half to three hours. It begins gently and turns rough and exposed along unprotected clifftops, past geos and seabirds to Old Keiss Castle, a Sinclair tower house recorded as ruinous by 1700 and dramatically sited above the cliff top. The ruin is unsafe to enter; view Old Keiss Castle from outside.

Keiss lies on the A99 between Wick and John o' Groats, and the number 77 bus stops here on its way between the two. Wick, a few miles south, has the nearest railway station, the end of the Far North Line from Inverness, and the Old Pulteney distillery if you want a tour and a tasting.

Evening at the harbour

Back at the harbour in the evening, the boats knock gently at the wall and the bay goes flat and silver, and it is easy to forget the cameras were ever here.