Sleet mixed with hail was hammering on the windows in the black of an early January morning, and our local road was covered in glazed ice and slippery slush.
My intended bike ride would have to wait.
But a winter morning when I’m fortunate enough not to have anything seriously wrong with me is not to be wasted by staying indoors.
I had a quick look at the bus times. If I took the car into town I could get a ride to Castletown and walk the seven or so miles back to Thurso along the coast, probably the least adventurous trip in the county but a nice little outing for a winter morning.
Waterfall near Murkle Bay.
The bus hurtled along the Castletown road, bouncing through potholes and throwing up sheets of water from roadside puddles while the driving sleet did its best to wash some of the mud off the windows, allowing glimpses out towards the sea.
The only two passengers alighted and I set off down towards the harbour as the weather brightened.
It was impossible to walk on the icy road and I was glad to take the path through the wood.
A rock ridge to scramble across.
This patch of ground is totally transformed from the days when a landfill site was imposed upon the village with smells, smoke and cockroaches invading local homes.
Now replanted, it’s a big enough patch of deciduous woodland to get lost in.
I took the popular track along the coast above the shell beaches then, when the track turned up to Quarryside, made my way down as a curlew called.
If the tide is reasonably low, you can follow the shoreline all the way to Murkle Bay.
Some people do not know that Castletown has fine shell beaches and extensive rock pools among the low rocks.
Murkle Bay.
Groatie buckie (cowrie) shells can easily be found once you get your eye in, the trick is to look where mixed piles of shells have washed up.
Beware, it’s addictive, when you find one you always want to look for just one more before moving on, and then another…
In between the sands were wet slabby rocks, some slippery and some still ice-covered.
The shell beach shore.
As you near Murkle Bay you need to scramble over a steep rock barrier and negotiate sloping wet slabs, but there is always the muddy field edge above if you prefer.
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In winter, the Murkle Burn, which drains the northern side of Olrig Hill, can be hard to cross without wet feet, but there is a bridge just a little way up and then a track through the farm leading to West Murkle.
If the tide is low and you can get across the burn it’s nicer to keep going round the point along the shore.
You will almost always see a flock of waders here, white wings flashing as the flock dips and turns, probably turnstones.
Shower moving in, Thurso East.
The wind was picking up from the north with the occasional rattling hail shower, there was the usual big swell off Clardon Head with breakers rolling into Clardon Haven.
A faint path leads all the way to Thurso, gradually improving.
You cross below the former American base at West Murkle, passing the remains of the concrete anchors for the old tall radio mast.
Mesmerising breakers roll in below, you keep watching to see if the foaming water will get to the top of the next sloping slab.
All that energy and no good way of capturing it, which is as well or all our coasts too would be industrialised and tamed.
The track along the shore from Castletown.
The path gets increasingly muddy as you pass below the Thurso sewage plant and its associated migraine-inducing wind turbine.
At Thurso East world-class surfing, the best in Scotland, incongruously shares a base with a muddy farmyard where tractors cart feed bales in front of a small hut little bigger than a portacabin.
In the strong winds the surf was too messy but no matter how cold the weather, if the surf’s up, the keen surfers will be out there, having travelled from all over the country.
The sea, of course, is relatively warm but I am simply not tough enough to be wiped out by a six-metre wave as it’s just getting light on a December or January morning with a bitter wind and a temperature well below freezing…
As hail and cold rain swept across again, it was good to see the car waiting where I’d left it near the end of the road. A fine, if tame, little walk for a January morning.