Dunnet
| |
|---|---|
 Mary Anne's Cottage Museum, a museum of crofting life, in West Dunnet | |
  Dunnet Location within the Caithness area | |
| OS grid reference | ND221713 |
| Council area | |
| Lieutenancy area | |
| Country | Scotland |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | THURSO |
| Postcode district | KW14 |
| Dialling code | 01847 |
| Police | Scotland |
| Fire | Scottish |
| Ambulance | Scottish |
| UK Parliament | |
| Scottish Parliament | |
Dunnet is a village in Caithness, in the Highland area of Scotland. It is within the Parish of Dunnet. [1]
The village centres on the A836 – B855 road junction. The A836 leads towards John o' Groats in the east and toward Thurso and Tongue in the west. (At the junction however the road's alignment is much more north-south than east-west.) The B855 leads toward Brough and Dunnet Head point in the north.
The Northern Sands Hotel is located on the A836, adjacent to the village church. It is a small hotel with 12 bedrooms, a large dining room, a large car park and 2 bars. It was originally called The Golf Links Hotel, there being a links course between Dunnet and Castletown that fell into disuse during World War II. It was taken over by the RAF during WW2 & used to station pilots from the nearby RAF Thurdistoft fighter station. It is locally owned and in 2017 undertook a major renovation.
The village has a hall, The Britannia Hall, which is run by a committee, and which is used for a variety of activities including a children's nursery, an indoor bowling club, a badminton club and the Post Office, which visits twice a week, on Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays. Its main fund raising activity each year for the upkeep of the hall is the Marymas Fair, held in late August on a nearby farm field, it has the usual attractions such as Highland dancing, a display of vintage and classic cars and motorcycles, bonniest baby, home baking, tossing the wheatsheaf, line dancing, face painting, raffles and tug of war.
The House of the Northern Gate (sometimes called Dwarick House) sits in a commanding position on Dunnet Head, overlooking the west side of the village. It was built between 1895 - 1908 by Admiral Alexander Sinclair who also owned Freswick, Keiss & Dunbeath Estates. Admiral Sinclair died in 1945 and the estate was broken up, the last croft to be bought by its tenant was by Mary Ann & James Calder, now a museum. The estate was bought in 1948 by Commander Clair Vyner and his wife Lady Doris Vyner. They used it as a summer residence and ran the local salmon station. Lady Doris was a close friend of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, and invited her to stay at the house in 1953. During her stay, she looked east out of one of the upper floor windows and spied the tower of the recently vacated Barrogill Castle, 6 miles (9.7 km) away. Upon enquiring about the castle, a visit was arranged to view it. It was owned by Captain and Mrs Imbert-Terry, an eccentric couple whose family reputedly owned Terry's chocolate factory in York. A deal was struck to buy the rather dilapidated castle and Longoe Mains farm for a reported £6,000. The Queen Mother renamed it the Castle of Mey, its original name.
The House of the Northern Gate was run as a hotel by Bill Dodd from 1967 until 1974 and then owned by a Mr Divanian Gold from 1974 until around 1984/5, a flamboyant Jewish fashion clothes manufacturer from Manchester, who used it as a summer home. He later tried to sell building plots on its land, but the council vetoed the project on grounds of drainage and sewerage difficulties, because the land is flow country or blanket bog.
In 1974 when it came on the market, the rock band Led Zeppelin viewed it several times with a view to making it into a recording studio. A possible reason for this may be that guitarist Jimmy Page already owned Boleskine House, for many years the home of notorious occultist and white witch Aleister Crowley, near Foyers on the south bank of Loch Ness, and was a frequent visitor to Caithness. During this period, scenes from a horror film were recorded using the outside of the house as a backdrop. The house was empty until 1984/5, when a family from Kent bought it and made it into a private residence again. It has 1,800 acres (7.3 km2) of land, 6 lochs and a small beach, the Peedie Sannie ("Small Beach").
Dunnet Church is near the road junction and has documented history dating from 1230.
From 1726 to 1750 the minister was Rev James Oswald who was born and raised in Dunnet and served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1765. [2]
CH Haygarth & Sons, Gun and Rifle Makers, are situated on the A836 on the eastern side of the village. It is Scotland's oldest practicing gunmakers and the only full-time gunshop North of Inverness.[ citation needed ] The business was started in nearby Thurso by Colin Haygarth in April 1957. They are unusual in that it is still family owned and run by Colin's second son, Ross, marking the business's third generation of ownership by the Haygarth family. They were the Queen Mother's Gunsmiths from 1965 until her death in 2002. The building was the site of the original village shop and petrol pump, and was owned by the Begg family. It closed in the mid-1950s. The property was built in 1899.
Brotchie's Steading is a ruined croft house just to the west of Dunnet Church. [3] It originally became the focus of archaeological interest because structural members (cruck blades) in one of the rooms were known to have been formed from a pair of whale mandibles, probably from a fin or blue whale. These are presently housed in the Dunnet Bay Visitor Centre.
An excavation by Headland Archaeology was undertaken to examine the role of whale bones as a construction material in Caithness croft houses, but it quickly became apparent that the 19th to 20th century croft houses sit on a much older and extensive archaeological site.
Trial trenching has shown that the bank upon which Brotchie's Steading sits is largely man-made and part of an extensive settlement mound that possibly includes a ruined broch. The earliest deposits excavated were from an occupation surface and material from this provided a date in the range 390-170 BC. At the north end of the site, a thick layer of stone rubble associated with a clay and stone-lined pit and two red deer antler picks was identified. Radiocarbon dating showed these to be from the 1st to 3rd centuries AD. The overlying strata supported by a sequence of radiocarbon dates and dateable finds indicate that the site was also a focus of human activity in the 5th, 13th and 15th centuries up until the early 20th century. While the full extent of the site is currently unknown, the knoll upon which Dunnet Church now sits would appear to form a part of a major archaeological site that has seen almost continuous, or at least regular, occupation for over two millennia. [4]
Thurso is a town and former burgh on the north coast of the Highland council area of Scotland. Situated in the historical County of Caithness, it is the northernmost town on the island of Great Britain. From a latitudinal standpoint, Thurso is located further north than the southernmost point of Norway and in addition lies more than 500 miles (800 km) north of London.
Caithness is a historic county, registration county and lieutenancy area of Scotland.
Durness is a village and civil parish in the north-west Highlands of Scotland. It lies on the north coast of the country in the traditional county of Sutherland, around 120 miles north of Inverness. The area is remote, and the parish is huge and sparsely populated, covering an area from east of Loch Eriboll to Cape Wrath, the most north-westerly point of the Scottish mainland.
Dunnet Head is a peninsula in Caithness, on the north coast of Scotland. Dunnet Head includes the most northerly point of both mainland Scotland and the island of Great Britain.
Lairg is a village and parish in Sutherland, Scotland. It has a population of 891 and is at the south-eastern end of Loch Shin.
Castletown is a village on the north coast of the Highland council area of Scotland, situated near Dunnet Bay. It is within the civil parish of Olrig, where it is the main settlement, and within the historic county of Caithness. The A836 links the village with Thurso and Tongue in the west and with John o' Groats in the east. The B876-A99 links the village with Wick in the southeast. Contrary to the common misconception, the name Castletown is a misnomer as there is no castle within the village limits.
The A836 is a major road entirely within the Highland area of Scotland. It is 122 miles (196 km) long and runs from Ross and Cromarty to Caithness, with the majority of its length in Sutherland. At 58.648°N where it passes through East Mey, it is the northernmost A-class road in mainland Great Britain.
Forss Water, known also as Forss River, has its source at the northern end of Loch Shurrey, at grid reference ND042568. About 13 kilometres north of its source the river flows into Crosskirk Bay and the Atlantic Ocean at ND029700. Crosskirk Bay is on the north coast of Great Britain and about 8 kilometres west of the burgh of Thurso, Caithness, in Highland, Scotland. The river marked the eastern extent of the Clan Mackay raid in the Sandside Chase of 1437.
Bonar Bridge is a village on the north bank of the Kyle of Sutherland to the west and the Dornoch Firth to the east in the Parish of Creich in the Highland council area of Scotland.
Reay is a village which has grown around Sandside Bay on the north coast of the Highland council area of Scotland. It is within the historic Parish of Reay and the historic county of Caithness.
Watten is a small village in Caithness, in the Highland area of Scotland, on the main road (A882-A9) between the burgh of Wick and the town of Thurso, about twelve kilometres west of Wick and close to Wick River and to Loch Watten. The village is on The Far North railway line but trains stopped calling at the village in 1960. The railway station is now a private house.
Golspie is a village and parish in Sutherland, Highland, Scotland, which lies on the North Sea coast in the shadow of Ben Bhraggie. It has a population of around 1,350.
Skarfskerry is a settlement located in the far northern county Caithness on a small peninsula northeast of Thurso off the A836 in Scotland. It is the most northerly settlement in Great Britain. The name comes from the Old Norse for "cormorants' rock". Historically, it belonged to the Parish of Dunnet, along with Brough.
Broubster is a village in Highland, Scotland. Near Broubster, there is a Bronze Age megalithic arrangement. Ten stones remain of an original set of approximately 36. The arrangement is similar to a larger arrangement at Achavanich.
Headland Archaeology Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the RSK Group. Headland provides archaeological services and heritage advice to the construction industry.
Armadale is a small village on the north coast of Scotland, in the council area of Highland. The village is part of the parish of Farr, in the county of Sutherland. Armadale is about 30 miles west of the town of Thurso, off the A836 road. The population of Armadale is 50 and shrinking, with 32% of the population being retired, and the remaining 68% population are working or at school.
Brough is a small village in Caithness in the North of Scotland. It is located on the B855 single-track road, the most northerly numbered road on the mainland of Great Britain, and is a few miles to the south east of Dunnet Head, the most northerly point on the British mainland, and a mile or so north of the village of Dunnet. It lies in the civil parish of Dunnet. Brough is the site of Brough Castle, a twelfth Century Norse fortress; the ruins are on the property now known as Heathcliff. Brough is the most northerly village on the British mainland.
Thurso Castle is a ruined 19th-century castle, located in Thurso, Caithness, in the Scottish Highlands. Situated in Thurso East, off Castletown Road, east of the River Thurso, the site can be seen from across the river. The current castle ruins date to 1872; A large part was demolished in 1952, although there has been a fortress here since the 12th century. Part of the castle is still habitable and remains a home of the Viscounts Thurso.
The North Highland Way is a proposed 150 miles (240 km) hiking, cycling and horse riding trail in Scotland. Currently without official signage, it is navigable by GPS, linking Duncansby Head on the North East coast to Cape Wrath in the North West of Scotland's coast. The North Highland Way connects the Cape Wrath Trail in the west with the Moray Firth trail in the east. The North Coast 500 is a driving route, which follows a similar line to the North Highland Way.
Loch Heilen is a loch in the civil parish of Dunnet in Caithness, Scotland. St. John's Loch and Loch Heilen are the two largest lochs in the parish. It is about two miles inland from Dunnet Bay to the west, which is on the north coast of Scotland. The town of Thurso is about eight miles to the west.
