The Burn of Latheronwheel runs down through a wooded glen and out at a narrow rocky inlet on the Moray Firth, where a small nineteenth-century harbour sits below high cliffs. A landing beach, a storehouse built into the rock and a stone-lined channel for the burn are surviving evidence of a fishery that once kept around fifty boats. You come down to it from the A9, through a broad valley, with the village opening out ahead as you go.
Just above the harbour, Wade's Bridge carries a footpath over the burn — a single hump-backed span of rubble with a dressed arch ring and no parapet, about forty-eight feet across, probably built in the later eighteenth century before Telford ran a higher road through around 1810. Walking is easy around the harbour and harder on the shingle beach, and there are picnic benches and free parking at the bottom. Birds nest along the rocks by the jetty.
There is a good butcher: Donald Cormack, a family business on Harbour Road, known for hand-cut bacon, sausages, haggis and black pudding. At Smerral, the next hamlet along, the family-run Ice & Fire Distillery makes small-batch gin flavoured with salmonberries and purple heather tips gathered from the croft around it.
The Old Smiddy Inn at Thrumster, out on the road toward Wick, is a nearby option — a small country pub with a lounge bar and an open fire, where the regulars are local and the evening sometimes turns to stories, songs and bagpipes. Recent menus have included homemade soup, spicy potato wedges, prawn cocktail, haddock and scampi, chicken strips, chocolate-orange cheesecake and sticky-toffee pudding. One recent visitor called it "a proper pub, with proper food, no gastro pub mumbo jumbo nonsense."
The former Dunbar's Hotel is now a bed and breakfast called The Blends. It took the name from an 1890s proprietor who blended whisky of uncertain legal standing; Jo and Steve Atkins run it today, and will cook evening meals and make up packed lunches for guests who ask.
Four miles up the coast at Lybster, the Waterlines centre keeps displays on the herring fishery and the local wildlife, a lighthouse and a sheltered pebble beach, with a coffee shop doing crab rolls, panini and cake. Dunbeath, the other way, has a heritage museum in the old school given largely to the novelist Neil Gunn, whose Highland River follows the strath behind it. The cliff staircase at Whaligoe is another short drive off.
The village sits directly on the A9 between Wick and Helmsdale; the 918 bus calls at the shelter on weekdays, and Stagecoach's X99 between Inverness and Thurso stops here too.
It was laid out as a planned settlement from 1835 on Captain Dunbar's land. He wanted it named Janetstown after his wife, and the name lingers on old maps. The harbour followed a few years later, with tenants taking two-acre plots and the right to fish; at its height about fifty boats worked the inlet, salmon giving way to herring. A surveyor's plan of 1840 labels a curing station, salt cellars, a cooperage, coopers' shops, a curing beach and a boatbuilder's shed. In the herring season crews came down from Lewis and lodged with the boat owners, and the catch went by cart to the railway at Helmsdale.
Older things sit in the ground around the village: a broch, long and chambered cairns, a pair of standing stones. West of the houses two whalebone ribs stand upright in the grass, thought locally to be more than a hundred years old.
Back at the harbour, a path follows the burn up through the trees for about 1.4 miles, past carved trunks and small toadstool houses tucked into the banks, with steep steps to a viewpoint near the top. Volunteers cleared the glen in 2017-18 and made three fairy houses out of tree stumps. Children can come down to find the doors.