Watten

The Brown Trout and Loch Watten

The Brown Trout Hotel stands on Station Road, and most mornings someone in the bar is talking about fish. It is a family-run place, kept by Colin and Donna with Shannon among the staff, and it draws anglers who have come for Loch Watten. Donna cooks. Breakfast is the straightforward kind, sausages, eggs, bacon and tomatoes, and the evening food is home-cooked. One recent guest called Colin and Donna "exceptional hosts," which in a village this size counts for a good deal.

The loch is why many of them come. Loch Watten is a large, shallow marl loch, its water clear over pale stone, edged with reed beds, farms and crofts, and wilder and wooded along its north-west shore. Its wild brown trout have a name, and the Dounreay Fly Fishing Association keeps seven boats on the water and arranges permits for visitors. In winter the loch fills with migratory swans and geese.

Paths and practical connections

Getting to the water is short work. A tarred roadside path runs about nine hundred metres from the village towards the loch, with a last stretch of earth and gravel down to the shore. Another gravel footway leads half a mile out towards Camster Roadend, and there are shorter links along the river and past the playing field.

Watten sits on the A882, in rolling farmland between Wick and Thurso, and the road is the direct link between the two towns. Wick is about eight miles east, with the nearest railway station on ScotRail's North Highlands line. Stagecoach service 82 calls at the Post Office on its way between Wick, Halkirk and Thurso, twelve miles west. Woodside Stores, the community shop on Thurso Road, handles the everyday groceries.

Camp 165 and Alexander Bain

The village you walk through today sits partly on the ground of a prisoner-of-war camp. Camp 165 opened in 1943 and took prisoners from 1945; by 1947 it held around 2,800 men, among them hard-line Nazis, including the U-boat commander Otto Kretschmer. Other prisoners worked on local farms, put on concerts and plays, and attended the village church. The camp closed in March 1948, and its site was cleared for the houses of Bain Place and Achingale Place. The modern playing field is roughly where the camp football pitch stood, and bottles, pottery and barbed wire still turn up in gardens now and then.

The Bain in Bain Place is Alexander Bain, born in 1810 at Leanmore in the parish. He built an electric clock and an electric printing telegraph, an ancestor of the fax machine, and a memorial beside the village hall was raised by public subscription in 1943. Its inscription reads: "He thought above himself and so he helped to raise a new world industry."

Churches, flagstone and Wick

At the crossroads stands Thor House, built around 1813 opposite the old toll house, with decorative lintels added over its ground-floor windows a few decades later. The parish church at the edge of the village, a plain Gothic building with a pyramid-roofed bell tower, went up in 1908 and closed in 2025; it is now in private hands. Of the far older church, documented here in the thirteenth century and dedicated to St Magnus, only low walls survive, a rough platform with a commemorative cross at its centre.

The stone underfoot and in the walls is Caithness flagstone, quarried across the county from the late eighteenth century for buildings, harbours and the long stone fences that run out across the fields. For a bigger day out, Wick has its heritage centre eight miles down the road, with period rooms, a box bed, the Johnston photographs and the old fishing boat Isabella Fortuna.

Evening at the loch

Back at the loch on a still evening, the boats sit out on the water and the reed beds go quiet, and the talk in the Brown Trout turns, as it tends to, to what was rising.