Scrabster

Two harbour kitchens

The most northerly tapas restaurant in the UK sits in a former chapel at the harbour's edge. Capilla Tapas was built as a place of worship for the Scrabster community in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, spent years as offices, and was unoccupied from 2006 before its conversion into Capilla Tapas, serving Caithness scallops with saffron aioli and chorizo crumb, haggis-and-cheese balls, mussels in white-wine sauce and paella. It calls its cooking "Spanish in Spirit, Scottish at Heart," and doubles as a daytime café of Scottish breakfasts and lunches.

A few doors along, The Galley is the harbour restaurant run by chef-owner Jody Sinclair, who bills it as a contemporary Caithness kitchen built around Highland and island produce. Under earlier owners Jim and Mary Cowie it was named the Sustainable Restaurant Association's Scottish Food Made Good champion in 2016, an award Raymond Blanc presented.

Waterfront inn and working port

For something plainer, the Ferry Inn faces the water about a hundred metres from the Orkney terminal. The Popeyes bar downstairs has live sport, a pool table and local beers and spirits; the Upper Deck restaurant above it looks out towards Orkney. The kitchen serves locally caught seafood. A July 2025 menu listed Cullen skink, black-pudding scallops, homemade fish pie, haddock and chips, king-prawn linguine, and a haggis-and-red-onion pizza; check the current menu before you go. There are en-suite rooms upstairs if you miss the last sailing.

Scrabster is a working port first and a village second. It occupies the western end of Thurso Bay, its piers and fish-market sheds packed tight against the cliffs below an open, almost treeless plateau of large fields and stone walls. It has been a trust port since an Act of Parliament constituted it in 1841 for deep-water anchorage, and it still lands whitefish and shellfish, and also handles ferries, cargo and cruise ships. Thomas Telford designed the first pier here in 1820; the most recent quay work was finished in 2021.

Holborn Head on foot

The walking starts from the car park. The Holborn Head circuit is a 4.75-mile loop of about two hours, climbing 134 metres over grassy clifftop paths, a farm track and a stretch of road. It passes a deep cave, blowholes, a natural arch, an arched sea stack called the Clett, and outcrops named Spear Head and the Turrets, before turning back past disused clifftop quarries. On a clear day the view runs across Thurso Bay to Hoy and the Old Man of Hoy. The cliffs are sheer and unprotected, one fence briefly forces you close to the edge, and in wind the whole route is best left alone.

Castle and lighthouse layers

Between Scrabster and Thurso, on the coastal promontory, stand the ruins of Scrabster Castle, first recorded in 1328 and home to the bishops of Caithness until a final reference in 1566; by 1726 it was "wholly ruinous." A full-height pillbox from 1940/41 sits on top of the medieval tower, and the anti-tank blocks nearby are stamped with their pouring dates, 7-10-40 and 14/10/40. Across the bay, Holborn Head Lighthouse—a square tower rising from a keeper's house, designed by the Stevensons and lit in 1862—was bombed during the war and came through undamaged.

Connections from Scrabster

Thurso, a couple of miles off, has the shops, the railway station on the Far North Line and a leisure centre with a twenty-five-metre pool; the X99 bus runs from the ferry gangway down to Inverness by way of Wick, and the MV Hamnavoe crosses to Stromness up to three times a day, ninety minutes on the only ferry that passes the Old Man of Hoy. Down at the terminal there is a rack of bike-repair tools bolted to the wall for anyone to use. If the sky is clear, that's reason enough to be up on the cliffs by mid-morning, watching for Hoy.