The Plough Inn has a fireplace lintel dated 1691 and a wood-lined public bar with its original semicircular counter and gantry. Behind the bar, a tiny room now used as a urinal keeps a serving hatch and is thought to have once been a jug bar. The pub was rebuilt by John Robb in 1907, though it has served the community since 1691. The kitchen's speciality is stone-baked pizza; one regular, Jay K., recommends the Ploughman's. Cromarty Brewery's Happy Chappy, a session golden ale, is usually on the pumps, alongside a second Cromarty beer that changes — worth checking what's on before you go. Dogs are usually welcome, and there is a small grassed sun-trap out the back with trestle tables.
Down on the front, Crofters Cafe sits at 11 Marine Terrace, licensed and looking at the water. The haddock comes crispy-battered with chips, salad and tartare sauce; there is macaroni cheese with garlic bread, Bannermans breaded scampi, and a beef burger with bacon and cheese. The coffee is illy, and there is home baking, desserts and ice cream.
The village store, Rosemarkie Stores, is a SPAR at 17 High Street run by Mark and Claire Hemsworth. It carries local goods: bread from Cromarty Bakery, beer from Cromarty Brewery, and milk and ice cream from Black Isle Dairy. The same dairy supplies the Rosemarkie Beach Cafe on the shore.
The beach is long and sandy, the closest of its kind to Inverness, and it has a picnic area, rock pools and an equipped seaside play area. Walk north and the shore turns rough beneath the Scart Craig cliffs, with caves, coloured rock and sea stacks; the going there depends on the tide and is impassable around high water.
Behind the village, the Fairy Glen is a two-mile round of about an hour, a stepped path climbing through beech, rowan, ash and oak to two waterfalls and returning along the beach. It steepens and grows slippery near the falls, with several flights of steps. An old millpond in the glen, at least two centuries old, once supplied ice to the village's fish-houses. Children here used to dress a spring-side pool with flowers, to keep the fairies content and the water clean. For a longer day, a circuit out to Caird's Cave, Brown Hill and back down through the glen runs to nearly six miles.
Rosemarkie Parish Church, built between 1818 and 1822, has a crenellated west tower with carved male and female heads for its stops. Inside there is a horseshoe gallery on clustered columns and an original pulpit topped with a crown-shaped sounding board.
Groam House Museum stands on the site of an early Christian monastery of around 1,250 years ago. Its centrepiece is the Rosemarkie cross-slab, an 8th-century stone 2.6 metres tall, carved with Pictish symbols and Christian crosses; the museum also holds the George Bain collection of Celtic art, runs family activities and Pictish board games, and asks only for a donation to enter. The building was given to the town in 1974 by a resident, Mario Pagliari, and opened as a museum in 1981.
The caves along the shore have produced stranger things. In one, archaeologists found a man buried in an alcove sometime between AD 430 and 631, violently killed, probably local, and, from his bones, fed on an unusually pig-rich diet. Whether he was murdered or ritually killed is still argued.
Fortrose, with its ruined medieval cathedral, is a walk of about a mile down the A832, free to wander and close enough to reach on foot; the Cromarty bus stops at the Fairy Glen car park on Bridge Street if you would rather not, though it's worth checking times before you go.
A kilometre the other way, the coast narrows at Chanonry Point, where resident bottlenose dolphins come in close to shore on the turning tide, watched from the beach beneath Alan Stevenson's 1846 lighthouse.