Lybster

The Hidden Harbour

The harbour at Lybster is out of sight from the village. You reach it down a steep road from Main Street to the mouth of the Reisgill Burn, where the cliffs open onto stone quays, a pebble beach, an octagonal lighthouse and the Moray Firth beyond. A small fleet still works from here, laying creels for lobster and crab.

At the foot of the descent, the Waterlines centre occupies restored fishing-industry buildings and tells the story of what the harbour used to be. There is a coffee shop with indoor and outdoor seating and a gift shop selling local crafts. Sit outside with the water in front of you and it takes some effort to picture the place at its height.

When Herring Filled the Quays

That height was considerable. Lybster was a planned village, founded from 1802 by General Patrick Sinclair, who built a timber pier in 1810; his successor Captain T. F. Sinclair paid for a stone pier finished around 1830. By 1833 this was the third-largest fishing station in Scotland. In 1853 the curers packed 47,186 barrels of herring. Two years later some 3,200 people worked the shore and sea trades, among them 734 gutters and packers and 111 coopers. The fleet peaked at 357 boats in 1859.

It did not last. A storm on 22 November 1847 drowned seven Lybster fishermen and left five widows and twenty fatherless children. The herring shoals disappeared around 1900, the young emigrated, and a harbour that had once employed thousands now works for a small working fleet. A government commission wrote in 1877 that Lybster Harbour was "in constant danger of being totally destroyed and with it the means [of] subsistence of nearly the whole population of the place…"

Village Life and an Ancient Cross

Up in the village the amenities are practical. The Portland Hotel stands at Quatre Bras, where the A99 runs through, with a public bar, a restaurant, a real fire and a beer garden. Siblings Steven and Sharn Swan reopened it in June 2018 after a two-year closure; it was the Portland Arms before that. On Main Street, the Lybster Village Cafe and Takeaway does a full breakfast, a vegetarian version and a steady line in cakes, and the SPAR at Grey's Place covers groceries, fresh meat, bread, hot food to go, an ATM and a PayPoint.

St Mary's, the former parish church, was built as a parliamentary church in 1836. In its churchyard, under a flagstone shelter, lies a rough boulder about a metre long incised with an equal-armed cross inside a double border — an early-medieval carving thought to have come from the Well of the Martyrs, disturbed when the harbour was being built in the 1840s.

The Exposed Coast and Older Stones

For a challenging coastal walk, head north, along the John o' Groats Trail toward Whaligoe. It runs 7.4 miles of clifftop past waterfalls, sea stacks and a natural arch, roughly five to six hours, and it is not a stroll: expect long grass, burns to cross and severe cliff exposure. It ends at the Whaligoe Steps, more than 330 of them cut into the cliff, once climbed by women carrying creels of gutted fish on their way to Wick, fourteen miles north and the nearest railway.

Inland, the Hill o' Many Stanes sets around 200 small stones in more than twenty rows down a moorland slope, put there roughly 4,000 years ago.

Golf on the Old Railway

The golf club keeps its own quiet piece of the past. Its nine holes run over fifteen acres above the firth, and its clubhouse is the ticket office of the old Wick and Lybster Railway, with the locomotive turntable now part of the practice ground. Clubs can be hired if you ask ahead.