Scotland’s next World Heritage Site – like Patagonia in miniature

I was giddily excited about the journey to Wick and Thurso. I had been to Scotland’s northeast corner only once before – a flying visit to John O’Groats after a road trip from Land’s End. I have little recollection of it except signing a book to register my visit and feeling that it was a bit pathetic to drive there when so many people rode bicycles or even, like Ian Botham, walked.

This time I was catching the train. As I live in Lancashire, the Caledonian Sleeper is not as convenient as it is for Londoners. It stops at Preston at 12.30am on the way up and at around 4.30am on the return leg. I managed to doze for a couple of hours and woke to coffee and porridge somewhere north of Perth.

The snow was right up to the trackside. I spotted a stag on a hillock. I saw the great slab of the Cairngorms’ central plateau. I saw the word “Dalwhinnie” and could almost taste the wee drams. But let me hasten onward past Inverness – a beautiful, rather posh town, firmly on the tourist trail – and get us on to the Far North Line.

This 161-mile railway weaves through the Flow Country: the largest area of blanket bog on earth. Look on a map and you’ll be struck by the line’s sweeping meanders.

While crossing wetland isn’t easy, it’s more straightforward than skirting the inlets and ups and downs of the coast. The train runs on an embankment and you can see glistening pools, rivulets and spongy peatland made up of sphagnum mosses, ling heather, asphodel and butterwort.

Formed over 10,000 years, the peat is up to ten metres deep. In the 1970s and 80s, Government tax incentives encouraged forestry and swathes of bog that had been treeless since forever were drained, gouged with deep furrows, and planted with fast-growing conifers.

The Flow Country became a battleground between pro-plantation developers and conservationists concerned at the destruction of such a rare, undisturbed habitat.

The area is now being allowed to recover, which is good for the planet – peat is a superb carbon store – and native fauna. Merlin, short-eared owls and golden eagles hunt over the mosses and pools.

Divers, plover and greenshank feed and nest in the wetlands. Microhabitats support insects, spiders, amphibians, reptiles and small mammals like shrews. In February 2023, a bid was submitted to Unesco to recognise this magical region as a World Heritage Site.

Under lowering sunshine, the tough grasses looked golden. It reminded me of the Patagonian steppe. When I first travelled around southern South America in the 1990s I would look for analogues of the landscapes of my Lancashire home. Now I find myself spotting little Patagonias in my homeland. Our northern end of the world is as beguiling as Argentina and Chile’s fin del mundo.

Wick is a solid, stone-built town that has a special atmosphere. Its name derives from Vik – indicative of a distant Nordic past – but it grew to prominence in the 19th century as a fishing port. It’s divided into two.

On the left bank of the river is a town centre that has seen better days. For every shop still open, there are three empty ones. I checked into Mackays Hotel, on the other side of the river, for two nights. It’s a cosy place with great steaks and whiskies, located on Ebenezer Place, the world’s shortest street. When night fell or rain blew in it was my refuge.

Rising up behind the hotel was Pulteneytown, the oldest planned industrial settlement. Thomas Telford built the harbour in 1803-11, adding a tidy grid of houses for workers and managers. Bang in the middle of the upper section of the houses is the Old Pulteney distillery; I went on a tour of the mash tuns, pot stills and dark warehouses, followed by a tasting. It’s strange to find yourself drinking single malts in the afternoon, but not at all unpleasant.

Nearby was the town’s other great attraction: Wick Heritage Centre, which tells the story of its prominence as Europe’s biggest herring fishing harbour through an eclectic mix of artefacts: a kippering kiln, militaria old and new (Wick suffered the first daytime bombing raid of mainland Britain in the Second World War), a fishing boat and the fabulous Johnston Collection of photographs.

The close-ups of fishermen were moving, and the panoramic shots of the harbour filled with barrels of salted “silver darlings” magnificent. Thousands of men came here to cash in, spending their downtime in local bars. The town got a reputation for heavy drinking, fights and prostitution. Temperance campaigners joined forces with local wives fed up with being handed empty wage packets. Prohibition was eventually imposed along US lines. It lasted from 1922 till 1947.

I mentioned to Donald Henderson, the chair of the Wick Society, which runs the heritage centre, that the landscape reminded me of Patagonia. He nodded and mentioned, almost as an aside, that many people from Caithness emigrated to Patagonia to work in sheep farms. The following day a book called From Caithness to Patagonia by Ian Leith was left at reception in Mackay. Life imitating daydreams.

A mid-morning walk took me along the coast, passing through the harbour and an old quarry squatted by fulmars. There were lobster creels and a few boats, but the boom today is wind power; turbine and cabling equipment filled the docksides. I walked past The Trinkie, an extraordinary natural sea-water lido on a shelf of bare rock, and came to a castle known as the Old Man. It was an atmospheric spot, with birds soaring on the cold thermals and mist and mizzle isolating me and the lichen-dappled ruin from the rest of the world.

I took the bus to Thurso. There was the option of a crack-of-dawn train but I didn’t want to hurry my Full Scottish. I only knew two things about my destination. One, that it was the northernmost town in mainland Britain. Two, that it grew bigger and got richer thanks to the Dounreay nuclear testing and experimental site, which came on stream – or “went critical”, as the jargon goes – in the late 1950s.

It was an airier, slightly livelier town than Wick and had a nice beach. It’s apparently a popular “cold surf” hangout. Again, I found a welcoming hotel, the Pentland, and a great little museum. I learnt a lovely third thing: that Thurso’s etymology contains an allusion to Thor, god of storms, sacred groves and trees.

You can’t come up here without ticking off Dunnet Head – Britain’s most northerly point. I then spent some time with Martin Murray who runs a nearby gin distillery. He’s rebuilding an old grain mill at Castletown to make whisky, using the famous Caithness flagstone – as used at Ground Zero in New York – and conserving lots of original features.

The Wolfburn and North Point Distilleries, which opened in 2013 and 2020 close to Thurso, and the even newer 8 Doors Distillery at John O’Groats, are already transforming the highest corner of the Highlands into a whisky hotspot.

I tried a drop of the 8 Doors’s peated whiskey in situ. Afterwards I met up with American expat Jay Wilson, who created the John O’Groats Trail about a decade ago. We did the short hike along the coast to Duncansby Head, the northeasternmost point.

It was a more than fitting end to my mini-odyssey. Jay showed me some geos – deep gullies where the sea rushes in – and led me across a patch of carpet bog. It rolls and shifts just like a soft rug. Flow Country is a perfect name. At the promontory, beneath the lighthouse, I looked back and saw, beyond a wall of impressive cliffs, the Noss Head lighthouse near Wick.

But which way was I to look – down or upward? Thurso was far north – as far from King’s Cross as Budapest is from Paris. But my gaze was drawn towards Stroma and the Orkneys. Why do travellers yearn to go to the ends of lines?

I don’t have an answer, but I think the urge is strongest in wide-open landscapes. Perhaps Thor came on shore and flattened Caithness and Sutherland by stamping his god-sized feet just to keep us wanting more.

Chris Moss’s trip to Caithness was supported by Visit Scotland and Caledonian Sleeper. Mackays Hotel has B&B doubles from £115. The Pentland Hotel has B&B doubles from £88. The standard tour at Old Pulteney is £15pp. See the websites of the Flow Country, Caithness and Sutherland tourism and the official distilleries map for more information.