Must-see attractions in Northern Highlands & Islands

Luskentyre is one of the biggest and most beautiful beaches in Scotland, famed for its acres of low-tide white sands and turquoise waters. A minor road…

Staffin Bay is dominated by the dramatic basalt escarpment of the Quiraing: its impressive land-slipped cliffs and pinnacles constitute one of Skye’s most…

Magnificent Dunrobin Castle, a mile past Golspie, is the Highlands' largest house. Although it dates to 1275, most of what you see was built in French…

As you head south from Durness, heather gradually gives way to a rockier landscape of Lewisian gneiss pockmarked with hundreds of small lochans. This is…

South of Cape Wrath, Sandwood Bay boasts one of Scotland’s best and most isolated beaches, guarded at one end by the spectacular rock pinnacle Am…

Six miles north of Gairloch, this splendid place is a welcome splash of colour on this otherwise bleak coast. The climate here is warmed by the Gulf…

This intriguing museum has some excellent carved Pictish stones. When ‘crop circles’ appeared in aerial photos some years ago, the foundations of an Iron…

Tracking the rise and fall of the herring industry, this great town museum displays everything from fishing equipment to complete herring boats. It’s…

One of Scotland’s most evocative historic buildings, the Arnol Blackhouse is not so much a museum as a perfectly preserved fragment of a lost world. Built…

Photogenically sited at the entrance to Loch Duich, Eilean Donan is one of Scotland’s most evocative castles and must now be represented in millions of…

The Callanish Standing Stones, 15 miles west of Stornoway on the A858 road, form one of the most complete stone circles in Britain. It is one of the most…

Consecrated in the 13th century, beautiful Dornoch Cathedral, one of the Highlands' loveliest churches, is an elegant Gothic edifice with an interior…

Dating from between 4000 BC and 2500 BC, these burial chambers are hidden in long, low mounds rising from an evocatively lonely moor. The Long Cairn…

Four miles south of Lairg, the picturesque Falls of Shin provide one of the best places in the Highlands to see salmon leaping on their way upstream to…

Eight miles east of Thurso a minor road leads to dramatic Dunnet Head, the most northerly point on the British mainland. There are majestic cliffs…

Skye’s most famous historic building, and one of its most popular tourist attractions, Dunvegan Castle is the seat of the chief of Clan MacLeod. In…

The Butt of Lewis – the extreme northern tip of the Hebrides – is windswept and rugged, with a very imposing lighthouse, pounding surf and large colonies…

The Baronial mansion across the harbour from Stornoway town centre was built in the 1840s for the Matheson family, then owners of Lewis; it was gifted to…

On the platform at Forsinard railway station is the RSPB's Forsinard Flows Visitor Centre, an exhibition dedicated to the neighbouring nature reserve…

The Castle of Mey, a big crowd-puller for its Queen Mother connections, is 6 miles west of John O’Groats. The exterior is grand but inside it feels…