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Walking Land's End to John o'Groats with Mark Moxon

Dornoch to Brora

The links at Dornoch
The links at Dornoch

The closer I get to John o'Groats, the closer the walking gets to being a hard slog. The reason isn't tiredness or a keenness to finish this walk, though they're certainly contributory factors; no, the reason is the A9.

Loch Fleet

Dornoch Cathedral
Dornoch Cathedral

It's easy to see how golf originated in Scotland because behind the beaches of the northeast are areas of rough that are essentially natural golf courses. Sure, man has mown the fairways and flattened the greens, but when walking through what are now the Dornoch links it's easy to see how nature determined the shape of the modern golf course. Inland courses might be a bit heavy on the landscaping but links courses are based on reality, a reality that occurs naturally behind the sweeping beaches of the Scottish coast.

Loch Fleet
Loch Fleet

Dunrobin Castle

A multilingual Post Office in Golspie
A multilingual Post Office in Golspie

From the pleasant seafront of Golspie things improved, with the path leaving the A-road to meander along the sea shore for three or four miles, passing right in front of Dunrobin Castle, the ancestral home of the Duke of Sutherland. Although there's been a house here since the 14th century, the current fairy-tale monstrosity was remodelled in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament, and if you want to know where Walt Disney got his inspiration for the Disneyland castle, you need look no further. Large conical spires shoot into the sky and the sheer size of the place can't fail to impress as it towers over its gardens and the beaches below. It's decidedly showy and slightly tacky, but it's great to walk past, even if it made me aware that I'm quite literally one of the great unwashed.

Dunrobin Castle
Dunrobin Castle