Strathy

An Inn and the Nearest Provisions

The Strathy Inn was built about two hundred years ago as a place for travellers to break the journey along the north-coast road, and it still serves as a visitor base and a social venue for the local community. Craig and Heather Frost run it now, with a bar and a small restaurant serving home-cooked food. A recent evening meal ran to venison casserole and curry; the kitchen has at other times sent out lamb shank, brie wedges with tomato chutney, green Thai chicken curry, whisky-and-caramel cheesecake and homemade rhubarb-and-ginger jam. It is the only pub in the village. One guest, Gillk0, wrote that Craig and Heather "made us feel very welcome and nothing was too much trouble."

Strathy is a scattered crofting community at the mouth of the River Strathy, about twenty miles west of Thurso on the A836. For milk, fruit and vegetables, or a bottle of wine, you drive four miles east to West End Stores and the post office at Melvich, run by Paul and Flora from a former crofter's building called Fern Cottage.

From Strathy Bay to the Point

The bay is Strathy's most popular attraction. The river drops twelve miles from Loch Strathy and meets the Atlantic on the western side of a wide sandy beach, dunes banked behind it, reached by a side road east of the houses. There is a log-cabin information point, parking and toilets, and the path to the sand crosses the dunes, which you are asked not to drive on. Surfers use the beach. A short climb up White Hill from the car park opens a view over the beach, the river valley and the two halves of the village, Strathy East and Strathy West.

West of the bay lies Strathy Point. The walk out to the lighthouse and back is about five and a half miles, two to two and a half hours, out along a tarmac and private road through grazing land, with an optional return over pathless short grass, so dogs stay on leads where the livestock are. You pass a cliff ravine, a sea arch and Lochan nam Faoileag, and from the marine-watch viewpoint the view reaches Dounreay and Dunnet Head. The lighthouse was commissioned in 1958 as Scotland's first all-electric light, with a twin-horn fog signal and a lamp seen twenty-six miles out. It was manned until 1997 and is no longer operational, switched off in March 2012. It is private now, and its steps are not for climbing.

The Priest’s Stone and the Salmon Station

Near the village hall lies the Priest's Stone, Clach an t-Sagairt, a weathered sandstone slab a little over a metre long, carved with a ball-ended cross and a smaller equal-armed one. It was first recorded in 1900 and dates to the early medieval period, and local tradition holds that moving it will bring great storms. The original sits about eight hundred metres from the hall over rough, often wet ground; a full-size replica stands in a case in the hall window.

Fishing shaped the place for a long time. Coastal salmon netting here passed through three generations of the Paterson family—George took the lease in 1927, Tom followed in 1966, and Simon ran it from the early 1980s until January 2007, when the lease was not renewed and one of northern Scotland's last coastal netting stations closed. Down at the shore the old "Portie" bothy once held the fishermen's bunks and drying space for their nets, with an ice house beside it.

Churches, Roads and Rail

The village keeps two Category C listed churches. The Free Church of 1845 is a plain five-bay building of rubble stone, with a minister's porch added in 1881 and Art Nouveau glazing of the same year; it is still in use. The former Church of Scotland closed after the 1931 union of congregations and was sold in 1972.

Strathy sits on the North Coast 500. The nearest railway station is Thurso, twenty road miles east and the northernmost stop on the Far North Line up from Inverness. The 803 bus links the inn with Thurso, Bettyhill and Tongue, though it runs seldom and is worth checking before you depend on it. Bettyhill, seventeen kilometres west, has the Strathnaver Museum in the old church of St Columba, with the Highland Clearances and the Pictish Farr Stone close by.

Cliff Flowers and Seabirds

In early summer the cliffs carry Scottish primrose, thrift and roseroot, and puffins, fulmars and kittiwakes nest on the ledges below.