Shandwick

The stone above the sandy bay

Clach a' Charridh stands in a glass shelter on the slope above Shandwick, a slab of sandstone nearly three metres tall that has held roughly this spot since around AD 800. Its seaward face carries a cross ringed by angels, beasts and serpents. The inland face is denser: Pictish symbols, a scene of twenty-two riders hunting and fighting, and a panel of fifty-two triskeles worked in tight spirals. A gale blew it over in 1846 and broke it in three. It was mended, conserved in 1988, and given the shelter it stands in now.

Below the stone the village is a thin strip between hillside and water. Shandwick is the southernmost of three Seaboard Villages — Hilton, Balintore and Shandwick — that run into one another along the Moray Firth coast. Its share is the broad sandy bay, backed by marram-covered dunes, with car parks, benches and picnic tables at the beach.

Food and supplies in Balintore

There is no pub in Shandwick, and no shop of its own. Both are north in Balintore, which the village joins without any obvious seam. The Seaboard Centre sits on the seafront there, a community building with a café looking over the firth. It cooks home-baked cakes, bacon rolls and freshly fried fish and chips, with vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options. Its gift shop and post office sell sea glass gathered off the local shores, Easter Ross honey, shortbread, tablet and fudge, and coffee roasted in Inverness. For a fuller shop there is a SPAR on Balintore's Main Street.

The Balintore Inn, a beachside inn once called the Balintore Hotel, handles the sit-down cooking: venison casserole with mash, lamb kofta with aromatic rice and mango chutney, lamb tagine with apricots and cashews, macaroni cheese and scampi. The menu moves around, so what is on when you arrive may differ.

Coastal paths and Pictish kin

The walking is the reason to stay. From the beach car park the Seaboard Trail runs north towards Balintore, mostly level and well surfaced apart from a dune section that narrows and steepens. It passes benches, the harbour, and a sculpture trail whose giant salmon, slate monuments and ten-foot Mermaid of the North mark the villages' long dependence on the sea. In the other direction, a shorter path leads to Tobar na Slàinte, the Well of Health: about three kilometres there and back, beach then grass then rougher ground, ending at a spring-fed stone trough on a small secluded beach. Water there, silvered with a dropped coin, was said to cure the Evil Eye.

The stone is not the only Pictish work here. It belongs with the slabs at Nigg and Hilton of Cadboll to a single accomplished local school, carved when this coast was wealthy enough to support the craft and, it is thought, to influence work as far off as Iona. Hugh Miller described the Shandwick imagery as "processions, hunting scenes, and combats." At Nigg, a short way inland, the Nigg Stone stands inside a harled kirk with a birdcage bellcote and a Dutch bell cast in 1624.

A cursed house and practical connections

Above the shore, Old Shandwick House was built between 1790 and 1805 for George Cockburn Ross, and gutted at some later point; its bowed centre and Venetian windows still face the sea. Local memory holds that a parishioner cursed the place after stone from a demolished meeting house went into its walls, and that it was never lived in. The more sober explanation offered nearby is sinking sand.

The nearest railway is Fearn, inland, an unstaffed halt on the Far North Line with a waiting room and no toilets. By road you leave the A9 at the sign for the Seaboard Villages and finish on local roads. Stagecoach's 23A calls on weekdays and Saturdays at a stop still listed as "Shandwick, Telephone Kiosk."

What remains by the shore

The chapel that once served the village has all but gone, its walls quarried and worn down to a run of footing near the shore. What endures is the stone on the slope, some twelve hundred years old and still looking out over the bay, with the picnic tables below it the busiest thing in sight on a clear afternoon.