The north and northwest Highlands - The Rough Guide to Scottish Highlands and Islands - page 262

Helmsdale Hostel Stafford St T 08701 553255,
W helmsdalehostel.co.uk. Snug from panelled walls and
wood floors - a legacy of former use as a gym - as much
as a woodburner in the lounge, this is a friendly wee
hostel with room for fourteen guests in two dorms or two
room s, mo st with single beds. Easter-Sept. Dorms £17 ;
twins £45

La Mirage Dunrobin St T 01431 821615. Not quite “The
North's Premier Restaurant” as it claims, but possibly the
most bizarre due to the tastes in decor of a former
proprietor who styled herself after Barbara Cartland. The
menu, although as dated as Babs herself, is solid: fish
or scampi and chips, gammon steaks, even chicken Kiev
(average £9). Daily 11am-9pm.

Dunbeath and around
The landscape becomes wilder north of Helmsdale. Once over the long haul up the
Ord of Caithness - a steep hill which used to be a major obstacle and is still blocked by
snowstorms - the scenery switches from heather-clad moors to treeless grazing lands,
dotted with derelict crofts and dry-stone walls.

Badbea
As you come over the Ord of Caithness, look for signs to the ruined village of Badbea ,
reached via a walk from the car park beside the A9. Built by tenants cleared from
nearby Ousdale, the settlement is now deserted, although its ruined hovels (and
information boards) show the hardships crofters endured - the cottages stood so near
the cliff-edge that children were tethered to prevent them from being blown over.

Dunbeath
DUNBEATH was another village founded to provide work in the wake of the Clearances,
laid along the glen beside the river. The local landlord built a harbour at the river
mouth in 1800, at the start of the herring boom, and the settlement briefly flourished.
It now suffers the indignity of an A9 flyover soaring over much of the village.
The novelist Neil Gunn was born in one of the terraced houses under the flyover and
his tale is told in the Dunbeath Heritage Centre (April-Sept Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sun
10am-4pm; £2.50; T 01593 731233, W dunbeath-heritage.org.uk) alongside exhibits of
local Pictish and Viking history.

4

Laidhay Croft Museum
May-Sept Mon-Sat 10am-5pm • £3.50 • T 07563 370231, W laidhay.co.uk
Just north of Dunbeath is the simple Laidhay Croft Museum , housed in an eighteenth-
century longhouse which encorporated dwelling, stable and byre. Restored from a ruin
in 1971, its re-creation of life in the early 1900s offers a useful riposte to the often
over-romanticized life of a Highlander before the Clearances.

Lybster and around
Another neat planned village, LYBSTER (pronounced “libe-ster”) was established at the
height of the nineteenth-century herring boom. Two hundred boats once worked out
of its picturesque small harbour, a story told in the Water Lines heritage centre here
(May-Sept daily 11am-5pm; £2.50 donation requested) - there are modern displays
about the “silver darlings” and the fishermen who pursued them, plus a café.

Grey Cairns of Camster
7 miles north of Lybster on a side road (to Roster)
Prehistoric sites litter the coast north to Wick - evidence of a past as fertile farmland
before it was smothered by a blanket of peat bog in the Bronze Age. The most
impressive are the Grey Cairns of Camster : surrounded by moorland, these two
enormous reconstructed burial chambers were originally built five thousand years ago
with corbelled dry-stone roofs in their hidden chambers.