EXTREME ATTRACTION

The most northerly point of Scotland is not John o’Groats. Trail goes to the very top of Britain and asks, “When it comes to cardinal extremes, where’s the point...?”

It must be gutting. To walk all the way from Cornwall to the far north of Scotland, through ever-tapering civilisation and ever-widening wildness, only to arrive in what is effectively Las Vegas, Caithness. By which I mean a photogenic sign, a hotel, some brightly coloured buildings and a bit of hoo-ha-hey-diga-dig. There’s nothing wrong with John o’Groats – it’s got a rather handsome hotel and a nice jetty and you can get a latte macchiato and a cheese and ham panini. And then, beyond this little scab of inhabitation, the land just sort of slides into the sea and that’s that.

Most people presume that this is the ultimate in far-flung places in which to find yourself in Britain. But it isn’t. It’s not even close. And moreover, it doesn’t feel like it.

The cardinal points of a country are satisfying things to go out and find, if you ask me. By definition they represent an extreme position of the land, but also an aspect from it. And each has its own inherent atmosphere deepened as a result. Plus, there are those intrinsic associations with cardinal points.

You go south to find warmth, coast and islands with that weird turquoise fringe around them, perhaps a dry Martini or three. In the east the winds are icy and the people hardy, the landscape flat and unshowy, like the utilitarian Baltic it looks towards. The west is woody and green and steep, with inlets and islands and forests and mountains and rain.

Then there’s the north. There’s something about the north. The place where the air thins and the light queers, where hairy people wear hairy clothes and everything fights everything else. In literature, Jack London wrote of strange, aurora-lit places of the Yukon in his An

Odyssey of the North. Tolkien had the Forodwaith, the Northern Waste cold lands. The Game of Thrones people were worried about the lands north of the Wall, not south-west of it. They all say the same thing in different voices: in the north, there be monsters.

So that’s the impressionistic, literary north. It’s not quite like that at Dunnet Head. And you probably won’t see anyone with an axe, or dressed in a bear skin, or Sean Bean. Though the feel of the place suggests you shouldn’t rule it out entirely.

Dunnet Head lies about 11 miles to the west of John o’Groats. It’s a quite different place.

Here the buildings are surreal and austere, and the ground dramatic: it rightly feels like Scotland’s ragged, northern edge. You come up on it and it’s a low-lying, loch-spattered peninsula with no trees and that big sky and hard horizon that suggests imminent coast. This peninsula – or headland, ergo Dunnet Head – is about four miles wide and three miles top to bottom, so not big, but it has a more than interesting history.

The cubey and doorless structures on the Head were built by the navy in World War Two as listening posts and lookouts, and the warship graveyard of Scapa Flow lies in the islands to the immediate north, where the Royal Navy had its base during the World Wars – and where the Germans sank their own imprisoned fleet, leaving the eerie, wreck-necropolis that remains.

There’s a beautiful trellis-windowed lighthouse, too, designed by Thomas Stevenson, who also designed the observatory on top of Ben Nevis, and later fathered Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s said that during storms the windows of the lighthouse have been blown out by stones thrown up from the cliffs. And some of the most ancient houses nearby have whalebone foundations.

There’s a house up on a bluff called The House of the Northern Gate, which was once visited by the Queen Mother and almost bought by Led Zeppelin to turn into a recording retreat – such is the pull of this place to interested people.

“IT’S SAID THAT DURING STORMS THE WINDOWS OF THE LIGHTHOUSE HAVE BEEN BLOWN OUT BY STONES THROWN UP FROM THE CLIFFS”

From one extreme to the other, it also pulled Trail here – but our interest, it has to be said, lay in what was beyond all of these things. There is a trig point here, but it’s in the middle of a flat, playing field-sized bit of grassy nothingness. Which might spur you to ask, “what is there here for the contour-craving hillwalker beyond a slightly strange, extreme-feeling outpost of the Scottish coast hung heavy with wartime ghosts?” Well, it’s not that there aren’t any contours here, it’s just that they’re all in the same place.

Dunnet Head terminates in a chevron of cliffs. The spectacular headland plunges into the sea in a shocking, scarier-than-a-mountain sort of way. From them you get an absolutely massive view stretching across the whole of the northern coast of Scotland towards Sandwood Bay and Cape Wrath to the west, north-west towards the Faroes and north-east to Hoy and the Orkneys, visible on the horizon as a great shelf of land across the Pentland Firth.

Were it not for a lip of land at Rora Head on Hoy, you’d see the sea stack of the Old Man projecting from the water like a raised finger. With an uninterrupted view north, you can see the incredible aurora borealis from here.

That’s the northwards. Then there’s the downwards: 300ft – almost a hundred metres – lies between you and the waves below in the space of one misstep. I walk along the cliff-edge path, barely a path, and look over and immediately pull back. The thing that always gets me about cliffs is when you look down and see birds not just flying, but flying at different heights, below you. I feel my stomach leap to my throat then drop to my knees in a manner occasionally experienced on buildings but rarely discerned in the mountains, when possibly your body is expecting drama and insulates itself against sudden frights.

The path weaves in and out of bites into the cliffs as I walk west and try not to panic. Slippy grass on tilted ground underfoot; the occasional gust of wind from the frigid winter sea below; the caw-cackle of fulmars wheeling around the cliffs and huddled in its recesses.

This place is as dramatic as any mountain range and stirs similar feelings of touching a wild, raw environment. The mountains are under cloud and sleet today but Dunnet Head, our wild substitute, is arguably at its best. This is the extreme north of the mainland – and it feels it.