Caithness: an Unexpected Corner

So, you drive over the bridge and leave Inverness behind. Soon, you will turn roughly left, as usual, heading for the dramatic shores and the magnificent mountains of Scotland’s fabulous north west.

What if you turned right instead, and carried on up the A9, zig-zagging drunkenly the path north? What will you find, towards the end of the road?

The wind will get up, and rage in your ears with little to stop it from laughing at you. You will leave behind the stately coastal towns of Easter Ross and Sutherland. The land lies down, prostrates itself, subsides. Over to the west, distant peaks rise black and pointed. But they are far away. Dull green acres race the miles that separate you from the hills, and the sky stretches, yawning enormous and flinty in a weak January sun.

You will pass through flatlands, a ruinous landscape of low-slung byres, falling one-storey houses and cowering caravans, where anything bigger than a molehill becomes precious shelter. A few trees – always spruce – courageously cling to life by the homes where they were planted. Above them tower pylons like alien invaders, and armies of wind generators, powering Scotland relentlessly.

In this exposed, stripped-down county of Caithness, there is no hiding the immense batteries and substations that convert the lacerating wind to warmth and light and send it on its way to town and steading alike. Birds balance on wires, feathers licked by gales, gripping fiercely.

It is not monotonous, this unexpected journey. The winter-bleached grasslands break up periodically into even flatter expanses – the peatland flows, sombre and dark and secret, clouds reflected like pewter from glimpsed water. Stones begin to dominate; low circles and horseshoes like the one at Achavanich, where each hewn stone follows the one before, face-on round the curve as if seeking shelter in its neighbour’s shadow. Then great flagstones upended become the very boundaries of land; a pattern of smaller fields is hinted at, somehow warmer, friendlier than those whose demarcation arises from cold wire.

The town, Thurso, erupts on the northern coast, unapologetic, in a mix of serviceable old stone and cold-looking blocks that seem to have been dropped from the edges of a disintegrating city. But Thurso has its Banksy, or a Banksy disciple at least, and that’s unexpected too, and oddly appreciated.

And you will find yourself drawn, at the end of the day, to the great surfing beach at Dunnet, deserted in January but for a galloping horse and its rider in the distance, to a Viking vision of the northern isles and a sky that mesmerises like one of the sagas of old.