Tongue

Two Pubs, Two Characters

Inside the bar of the Tongue Hotel there is a brass water tap fixed to the wall, once used to draw water so a guest could soften a dram. The bar takes its name from it. The building began as the Duke of Sutherland's hunting lodge in the mid-nineteenth century, and its visitor books run back to 1932. In the evening the Brass Tap turns drinks-led and has live music, while the adjoining Varrich Restaurant cooks local beef, venison and vegetables, langoustines and fish and chips. Well-behaved dogs are welcome.

The other pub is the Ben Loyal Hotel, known here as The Ben — family-run, with pool, darts and a real fire. The kitchen lists Loch Eriboll langoustines when they can get them, beer-battered Ullapool haddock, Highland chicken stuffed with haggis and wrapped in bacon, a fish pie of haddock and salmon, a Caithness cheeseburger and an apple-and-whisky crumble. Dogs are allowed in the bar on a lead. Round the back, circular bench tables sit on the grass above the estuary and the causeway, looking towards Ben Loyal and the Kyle.

Village Supplies and the Changing Kyle

For everything else there is the SPAR on Village Lane, which is also the Post Office: fruit and veg, fresh meat, groceries, an off-licence and cashback. It is the village shop.

The village stands above the Kyle of Tongue, a shallow sea loch where the open sea to the north meets Ben Loyal and Ben Hope to the south, moorland on either side. It is never quite the same twice; tide, sandbank, mudflat and light keep rearranging it. NatureScot calls the Kyle "a green, inhabited oasis on the exposed north coast of Scotland".

Castle Path and Mountain Ridge

The short walk everyone does climbs to Caisteal Bharraich, a two-storey tower house on a promontory above the water. It is a mile and three-quarters there and back, an hour or so, up through birch, sycamore, ash and oak and across the Rhian Burn, with three benches set to look back at Tongue. Only the final yards are rough. A freestanding iron stair, added after a winter storm brought down part of the east wall in 2015, lets you reach the upper level. The castle's exact origins and builder are uncertain, though the tower now standing is thought to be a 16th-century rebuilding of an earlier one; the repair work turned up animal bones, part of a rotary quern and a worked-bone object. When it reopened in 2018, the local schoolchildren played pipes, sang in Gaelic and English, and sealed a time capsule into the rebuilt wall.

Ben Loyal itself — 764 metres, four granite tors, the "Queen of Scottish Mountains" — is a longer and more serious day from Ribigill: boggy ground, a ford that can be impassable, a pathless climb to a ridge. On the way down you may pass the wreckage of a Handley Page Hampden bomber that came down in 1943. One of the crew survived, rescued by a Ribigill shepherd and the local doctor.

Jacobite Gold and Getting Here

In March 1746 a French-flagged ship called the Prince Charles Stuart was chased into the Kyle by a Royal Navy frigate while carrying gold for the Jacobites, and lost it all once the men came ashore.

Getting here takes some doing. The nearest railhead is Lairg, thirty-eight miles off by road, and Durness Bus 803 links the Tongue Hotel to Bettyhill and Thurso station. Twelve miles east at Bettyhill, the Strathnaver Museum fills the former Columba church with the history of the Clearances and Clan Mackay, and there is a swimming pool on the same road.

Church, Loft and Burial Ground

The parish church, white-harled and cruciform, was dated 1680 and enlarged more than once afterwards. Its west gallery was once the Laird's Loft; the Mackay canopy that hung there has sat in a museum in Edinburgh since 1951, and the Reay burial vault is still below the gallery. The burial ground looks out over the loch and the two hills.