When you are looking for things to see and do on the NC500, you may decide to drive through Caithness, or skip it completely. Don’t do this! Caithness is truly one of Scotland’s hidden gems!
Caithness is more like neighbouring Orkney than the Scottish Highlands. It is a land of big skies and open seas. One coast faces the North Sea, and the other faces the route to the Atlantic via the Pentland Firth. And you can find lots and lots of unique history hidden in plain sight!
Here are some suggestions of things to see and do on your trip round the NC500. I think you’ll fall in love with this remote county when you tread in the footsteps of its mysterious past.
The Vikings plundered and settled Shetland, Orkney and Caithness, leaving their legacy in the placenames.
‘Wick’ itself means ‘bay’ in Norse, and vikings’ raided ‘vics’ – or came from them perhaps. ‘Helmsdale’ is ‘the valley of the helmet’. (Whose helmet? I long to know). Thurso’s Gaelic name ‘Inbhir Theòrsa‘ means ‘Thor’s River’. Ulbster, Scrabster and Thrumster were all steadings or farms, from ‘sta’ in Old Norse.
The Earls of Orkney and Caithness controlled the area, amid many local disputes. (Think Game of Thrones with dragon-ships instead of dragons!) They owed allegiance to both Scotland and Norway, which must have been difficult.
The Norse were finally defeated at the battle of Largs in 1266. The treaty of Perth was signed after the battle, and confirmed that Caithness was part of Scotland.
The gloriously named ‘British Society for Extending the Fisheries and Improving the Sea Coast of this Kingdom’ was established in 1786. Developing the fisheries was seen as a way of “improving” the Highlands.
The society sponsored new towns around the Highlands, and Thomas Telford designed and built Poultney Town and the Harbour in Wick.
Each summer, shoals of herring ventured into the North Sea. Over 10,000 fishermen and fish-wives came to Wick two months every year. (About 4,000 people lived here at the time). They came to catch the ‘Silver Darlings’, and salt them in the harbour here.
There were sometimes 1,000 boats moored in the harbour, and you could walk from one side to the other on their decks. The catch could number in 50,000,000 fish in three days.
It was thirsty work, and Wick had 54 pubs in Wick at the time. The local minister was horrified and said ‘Multitudes can trace their ruin in body, soul, and outward estate, to such seminaries of Satan and Belial, as the lower public-houses generally are’!
As far as I know, none of the local pubs are still ‘seminaries of Satan and Belial’. But this might be why Wick was later a temperance town and “dry” from 1922 to 1947.
Over 100 million years before the dinosaurs roamed the earth, the mud and fish on the the bed of Loch Orcadie slowly settled in layers, and eventually turned into Caithness stone.
For centuries, local farmers would set Caithness flagstones on edge to use as field markers. The stone was not quarried commercially until the mid 1700s. Every year in the mid 1800s, enough slabs to pave five football pitches were shipped from tiny Castletown harbour alone.
Caithness flagstones have been laid over the world, from the Fray Bentos factory in Argentina to the Disney store in Venice, and of course in the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.
My stats are for 2016, and they show that only 17 quarries in Scotland still produce building stone. Two of them are here in Caithness. These Caithness quarries produce over a quarter of all building stone quarried in Scotland, and they export 60%-70% of it. Only these two, and two other Scottish quarries, operate all year round.
For 500 years, iron-age people in the far North of Scotland built impressive stone towers which we call ‘brochs’. Brochs stood up to 13-16 meters high and would have been visible for miles. Hundreds were built across Sutherland, Orkney and Shetland, but Caithness has more than any other place.
These two- or three-storey buildings, built of dry-stone walls, were the centre of communal life. No-one knows if they were the castles of their day, the base for a community of farmers, or the prestigious dwellings of iron-age chieftains.
Some are still impressive towers in open countryside, others are no more than mounds of earth. But they are all an important part of local life here in Caithness, where people feel a real connection with their mysterious neighbours from 2,000 years ago.
Caithness may feel remote, but it stands at the cross roads between the North Sea and the gateway to the Atlantic. It was a High-Security Area during WW2.
In some ways, living here then was a bit like living through our own recent lock-downs. Special security passes were needed by anyone coming here or moving around Caithness itself. This was to stop the word spreading about the military operations based here.
The Luftwaffe’s photographs of Noss Head are still some of the best aerial shots of the headland. They were probably looking for the Y-Station at Noss Head which was part of a direction-finding network listening for the Enigma traffic from the Luftwaffe, to pinpoint the location the signals came from. This information was sent to the code breakers at Bletchley Park.
I love this connection, because my mother was working there at the time, on Japanese Naval codes.
If you’ve read this far, you’ll know that so much of what makes Caithness special is its ancient past. The Flow Country, which makes up most of Caithness and some of Sutherland, is 4,000 sq km of 10,000-year-old blanket bog.
Unless you have been to the Great Vasyugan Mire in Siberia, or the Hudson Bay Lowlands in Canada, you will never have been in a landscape quite like this. This habitat is so rare and so special that the Flow Country is the first peatland World Heritage Site, and only the sixth natural site in the UK.
In some parts of the Flow Country, the peat is 10 meters deep. This is truly impressive when you find out that plants don’t rot in bog, when they die they build up into deep layers of peat at the rate of 1 millimetre each year. So the landscape is made up of deep peat dotted with bog pools.
The Flow Country is particularly important because peat stores huge quantities of carbon for thousands of years. The Flows store more carbon than all the UK’s remaining woods and forests combined, putting them on the front line against climate change.
About meMy name is Ben, and I fell in love with Caithness after buying the Lighthouse Keeper’s Cottage, here at Noss Head.
I love helping people find things to see and do on the NC500, and welcoming guests to stay here.
This blog was written by a human (me): see my AI policy.
