The old ferry pier still ramps down into the Beauly Firth, its massive sandstone side walls built by Thomas Telford in the early nineteenth century. Boats crossed here from the fifteenth century until July 1982, when the Kessock Bridge opened and the last ferry stopped. Before that, reaching Inverness the long way round the head of the firth meant about twenty-two miles by road. The city is across Kessock Bridge.
The village runs along that shore and up into woodland beneath Ord Hill, which takes the north and east winds off it. You are on the southern edge of the Black Isle, at the narrows where the Beauly and Moray firths meet, looking straight at Inverness. The bridge's four steel towers and their harp-arranged cables fill the skyline.
The North Kessock Hotel faces the water from Main Street, eight rooms with a restaurant and pub that the Maclachlan family has owned and operated for more than forty years. Darren and Eva operate the hotel and restaurant. The menu uses locally sourced ingredients and includes seafood dishes: home hot-smoked salmon with a beetroot-and-vodka chutney, scallops with a black-pudding fritter, pea purée and pancetta, and a Fisherman's Pie of salmon, smoked haddock and prawns. There is beer-battered haddock for the less adventurous, and the "Kessock Hamful," which is honey-roast ham wrapped around prawns in Marie Rose sauce. The cheese plate runs to Gruth Dhu, apple-smoked cheddar, Strathdon Blue and Caboc. Vegans get braised parsnip and a chocolate-and-coconut torte. One guest, D. Hook, summed the place up as "peace and quiet, amazing views."
A little along Main Street, the White Cottage Tearoom does home-cooked breakfasts, afternoon tea, organic tea and fresh-ground coffee, with fish and chips to take away. Stuart Stirling runs it, and the windows look over the water where, if the day is generous, you might see dolphins or otters. For anything you have forgotten, the Costcutter and Post Office at Whitehouse stocks Cromarty Bakery goods and seasonal fruit and vegetables, and keeps a bench outside facing the view. Anne Cullerton is behind the counter. Up by the A9 there is a Harry Gow bakery, part of a Highland family firm going back to 1979, for bread, pies, panini and pastries. A community market gathers at the village hall and the old ticket office, with local beef, venison, fish and chocolate, and bacon rolls served by volunteers.
The restored community pier is free to use for kayaks, small boats and angling, with parking alongside and a small jetty, though the tides are your own problem to read. The North Kessock Rowing Club, formed in 2022, has more than forty members and a skiff called Eilean Dubh, named after one of the last two car ferries and launched in May 2023 by Margaret MacDonald, a lifelong resident, before a few hundred spectators.
For walking, Ord Hill has waymarked trails through mossy woodland to the jumbled remains of an Iron Age fort, with views over Inverness and the Black Isle and the chance, entirely a matter of luck, of a dolphin. The longer circuit follows the waterfront east to Kilmuir, a row of cottages built around 1800, and the fifteenth-century ruin of St Mary's, where the north wall and both gables still stand and one gable holds a Gothic three-light window. One stretch of shoreline path is slippery with seaweed and vanishes at high tide, so check when the water turns before you set out.
Inverness is straight across the bridge for the railway station and the shops; Culloden lies a few miles beyond it. The Stagecoach 22 stops at the Old Pier on its way between the city and Culbokie.
At Craigton, on the terraces above the village, the crofters were once seafarers and ships' pilots who guided vessels through the sandbanks into Inverness Harbour.