Plockton

The harbour, prawns and waterfront hotel

Palm-like trees line Harbour Street, which is not the first thing you expect on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands. They are New Zealand cabbage trees, and they have grown along the front here since the 1960s, encouraged by a bay that faces east, away from the prevailing Atlantic weather, and by the warm drift of the North Atlantic. The effect is a village that curves around the sheltered head of Loch Carron with white and colour-washed cottages, gardens running down to the water, yachts on their moorings, wooded islets breaking up the bay, and the forested slopes of the Fearnaig crags behind. People call it the Jewel of the Highlands. It photographs as well as that suggests.

Start on the harbour, because the harbour is the point of Plockton. The boats sit close to the houses, benches and pub tables face the water, and the langoustines that turn up on both pub menus are creel-caught in Loch Carron and landed by village fishermen, sold here as Plockton prawns. Two boats supply them directly: Duncan McAndrew brings them in on the Cordelia and delivers around the village, and James Krisp lands prawns and brown crab on the Venture and sells from the boat or nearby. A Portsoy fish van also comes through, and the advice from residents is simply to listen for its horn.

The Plockton Hotel stands at 41 Harbour Street and is the only hotel on the water. It is run by the Pearson family, whose front lounge has a fire, with two dining rooms behind and a drinking garden across the road at the very edge of the inlet, looking over Loch Carron to the mountains beyond. It is a proper public bar as well as a restaurant. The seasonal menu leans on platters of the local prawns, fresh fish and shellfish, Highland steaks and locally reared beef, with venison in season. Five hand pumps carry changing beers from Scottish microbreweries — Swannay, Cromarty and Fyne Ales are the sort of names that come and go — and there is a Real Ale and Gin Festival each May. Dogs are welcome in the bar. The hotel took the Northwest of Scotland Bar of the Year title at the National Pub and Bar Awards, handed over by Grace Dent.

Inn, small-batch drinks and village shops

Round on Innes Street, the Plockton Inn is the more informal of the two, an eighty-cover seafood restaurant with a bar that doubles as the sociable locals' room. The bar serves the restaurant menu, so you can eat the same creel-caught langoustines, oysters, mussels and fish there. There is live music on Thursdays, and the Pinny Band and the Dog Squad turn up on selected summer dates, so it is worth checking what is on. The regular cask ale is Plockton Bay, a 4.6 per cent bitter, and one of the pumps usually pours something from the village brewery; drinks from Skye and Raasay are on the list too. Dogs are fine in the Highland Bar but not in the seafood restaurant, and the outdoor seating is a handful of tables rather than a garden — for that, cross back to the hotel.

The brewery behind that Plockton Bay is a genuinely tiny operation at 5 Bank Street, a nano-brewery run by Andy Will rather than anywhere you walk into for a pint. Alongside the bitter it makes Starboard!, a golden ale, and Ring Tong, a New World IPA. The Plockton Distillery, a few doors along at 12 Harbour Street, works at a similar scale, turning out small-batch gin and whisky and running guided tastings rather than a counter.

For everything else, the shops are close together and each has a clear job. Gather and Graze, at 30 Harbour Street in the old Plockton Stores premises, is a licensed deli and grocer with a barista coffee stop — cheeses, charcuterie, pantry goods, fine wines, craft beers and Scottish spirits, the food built around Scottish produce read through the cooking of the Scottish diaspora. Meghan's on Bank Street does nine flavours of Perthshire-made Italian-style ice cream, always with a vegan one, plus sandwiches, toasties and baguettes made on the spot, homemade cakes and traybakes, and a rack of Plockton ceramics, chopping boards and oak gifts. The Studio, in a restored 1860 building on Innes Street, is an art gallery, gift shop and café all at once, showing Scottish artists and pouring coffee alongside homemade cakes; it functions as much as a place to sit as a place to buy. When you want fish and chips, the Harbour Fish Bar faces the water on Innes Street, and Shonzey's, a blue van selling fresh fish and homemade chips, parks outside the Village Hall, though its day and pitch move about.

Community knitwear and walks beyond the village

The one shop worth going out of your way for is the Old Post Office, a single-room stone building that the community trust took over in September 2024. It sells newspapers and hand-knitted goods made by a rota of knitters from across Lochalsh — Jill Charnley, Ishbel Cameron of Drumbuie and Catherine Fraser of Kyle among them, the last two knitting for charity. The knitters have used the building informally for more than twenty years and the paper shop has run since 2016. It survived a bad chimney fire in the 1950s, after which villagers rebuilt it for a resident called Alicken Urquhart.

Beyond the village the walking is the main event. The path to Duncraig is a rugged three-and-three-quarter-mile loop of about two to three hours that follows the loch edge and the railway, passes an open-air church and an old brick chimney, skirts the private Duncraig Castle and comes back by the minor road, with views out over the pine-covered islands in the bay. The coral beach is easier and stranger: three-quarters of a mile from the airfield, about 40 minutes, ending in rocky steps down to a pale shore that looks like coral but is actually maerl, a dried calcified seaweed, with the Applecross mountains across the water. Longer legs can take on the Plockton Crags circuit, five and a half miles up forest tracks past two hill lochs, including Loch Achaidh na h-Inich, whose island is the remains of a crannog. Closer to home, the track along the Back Brae behind the houses gives a broad look over the bay, and the National Trust for Scotland keeps more than sixteen miles of paths across the surrounding Balmacara Estate, linking on to Duirinish and the shore.

Wildlife cruises and a planned fishing village

If you would rather be on the water than beside it, Calum's Seal Trips has been running for close to forty years, started by Calum MacKenzie with a former Thames police launch he bought for thirty pounds. The boats now go out on Loch Carron after common and grey seals, otters, seabirds, dolphins and porpoises, passing Duncraig Castle and Heron Island before coming back to the harbour. There is no promise of a sighting and no charge if no seals appear. Well-behaved dogs on leads can come, in limited numbers. Sailing is older still: the Small Boat Sailing Club was founded in 1933, twelve boats raced the first regatta the following July, and the two-week summer regatta remains open to visiting sailors with the right kit.

The village itself was planned, not grown. William Cumming laid it out in 1801 for Sir Hugh Innes, and by 1841 it held 537 people, two schools and a fishing trade sending herring by sloop and smack to the markets of Greenock and Glasgow. Harbour Street runs as an irregular continuous line of single-storey cottages and taller houses; Bank Street is a tidier row of mid-century cottages with coloured paintwork and individually carved dormer bargeboards; and out on the Harbour Street headland one low, whitewashed West Highland cottage keeps its heather-thatched roof and tiny windows. The Category A listed church on Innes Street went up in 1827 as a Parliamentary Church, built to plans drawn under Thomas Telford, and is one of only eight of them built with a gallery. Fishing declined, emigration and the losses of the First World War thinned the place out, and the station that opened in 1897 on the Kyle line eventually saw its Victorian building turned into holiday accommodation while the platform kept working as an unmanned station.

Poets, television and the slow way in

Plenty of people have washed up here and stayed longer than planned. The BBC filmed Hamish Macbeth in the village through the mid-1990s, standing in for the fictional Lochdubh. The Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean was headmaster of the high school from 1956 to 1972 and drafted part of Hallaig in a school jotter; the school named its Sorley MacLean Centre after him and now hosts the National Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music. Alfred Wainwright and his wife Betty came back to the same Bank Street cottage every year through the 1970s; of Plockton he wrote that he "always arrived in eager anticipation and departed with reluctance."

The trains are few — four each way on weekdays in high summer, two on Sundays, and the station is a ten-minute walk uphill from the harbour — and the roads in are minor and partly single-track, a deliberate detour off the coast route rather than a stop on it. That keeps the pace slow, which suits the place. On a normal morning the busiest errand in Plockton is the walk to fetch a newspaper, and it takes longer than it should, because you keep stopping to talk. "Sometimes it's a good hour before I get home," one resident says.