The harbour at Portmahomack is attributed to Thomas Telford, built between 1813 and 1816, and may incorporate earlier work, a ramped ferry pier and an L-plan fishing pier of coursed rubble that close the northern end of the bay. The village curves around a sandy beach behind it, climbing a slight slope, and although this is Scotland's east coast the village faces west, across the Dornoch Firth to the hills of Sutherland.
The Castle Hotel stands beside the water, a traditional Highland hotel with a refurbished bar and restaurant, a fireside and outdoor seating that looks out over the firth. It serves food and hosts live music that runs from rock and pop to ceilidh nights and choirs. Dolphins, seals and seabirds are seen from the property with some regularity.
For dinner there is The Oystercatcher on Main Street, a small fine-dining seafood restaurant with three guest bedrooms above it, where booking is essential. Lobster is the speciality, landed by the boats you can watch at the jetty, and the menu takes it seriously: lobster popcorn, lobster in whisky butter, lobster croquettes, chilled Cullen skink, and slow-braised wild red-deer shank with chestnut mushrooms and a juniper-scented port demi-glace. There is a long wine cellar and a range of malt whiskies to go with it.
Daytime eating is simpler. The Carnegie Hall Café works out of the Carnegie Hall itself, serving hot filled rolls, soup, sandwiches, paninis, cakes and bakes, with gluten-free, vegetarian and vegan options where possible. Up at the golf club, the Portmahomack Bistro & Bar, run by Lisa and her team, serves hot and cold food and home baking to non-members as well as golfers.
Port Stores and Post Office, run by Vicky and Colin, covers the essentials: fresh meat and vegetables, frozen and tinned food, newspapers, household goods, bottled gas, souvenirs and takeaway coffee. For meat, Seafield Game sells venison that is vet-checked and traceable, along with occasional free-range pork, as roasts, burgers, sausages, steaks and mince.
The building that gives the village its longer memory is the old Tarbat church, now the Tarbat Discovery Centre. It closed for worship in 1946, was saved by residents who formed a trust in 1980, and reopened as a museum in 1999. The present church dates to 1756 with earlier work built into it, and it has a squat ashlar belfry with an ogee roof; the burial ground around it, behind dry-stone walls, holds memorials from the late 17th century onward.
Beneath and around it lies the reason the archaeologists came. An aerial photograph led the University of York to dig here between 1991 and 2007, and the ground gave up a Pictish monastery used from the 6th to 8th centuries: a burial ground, part of a stone church, carved stones, evidence of smithing and fine metalwork, and workshops where vellum was made for manuscripts. The museum displays sculpture carved more than 1,200 years ago, including the Dragon Stone.
The best walk is the circuit out to Tarbat Ness, eight and three-quarter miles of mostly grassy shoreline that can be very muddy on the way out, past rocky coast, an old fishing bothy and rusting anchors to the lighthouse at the tip. Robert Stevenson engineered it, and its light was first shown in January 1830, four years after a storm wrecked sixteen vessels in the Moray Firth; the tower is Scotland's third tallest. Shorter walks run to Rockfield, a single street of fishermen's houses with restored 16th-century Ballone Castle at its entrance, and to Inver, with potential for wildlife sightings, including dolphins or seals.
You reach all this by peninsula roads rather than a trunk route, about nine miles from Tain and nine miles off the A9. Walkhighlands calls it "not somewhere anyone could arrive by mistake." The 416A bus links Tain and Portmahomack, and a demand-responsive dial-a-bus covers the village and the minor roads around it.
In 1942 the harbour was dressed up as an occupied Norwegian village for a propaganda film, Before the Raid, with local people as extras. A nineteen-year-old WAAF wireless operator named Mrs MacKay, working at the Tain firing range nearby, quietly photographed the cast.