Long before Mary, there were monks. The Beauly Priory - properly the Priory Church of the Blessed Virgin and John the Baptist - was founded in 1230 by John Byset of the Aird for the Valliscaulian order, an austere French monastic tradition that maintained only three houses in all of Scotland. After the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the priory buildings passed to Lord Lovat, chief of the Frasers, and most of them came down. The church survived, just, as a roofless ruin of pink sandstone arches that you can still walk through today. The fertile haughs around the priory grew the corn and later the soft fruit that made Beauly a prosperous trading village - coal, timber, lime, grain and fish moved through its small harbour on the firth.

Three miles south of the village rises Beaufort Castle, the chief seat of the Lovats. What stands today is a Victorian baronial mansion, but the site has been fortified since the time of Alexander II. Edward I of England besieged the medieval castle here in 1303. Several castles followed and several came down. Castle Dounie, the seat the Lovats lived in during the seventeenth century, was burned by Cromwell's forces in 1650 and then razed again by the Duke of Cumberland's royal army in 1746 - the systematic destruction of Jacobite power that followed Culloden. Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, watched the second burning from a neighbouring hill, then fled into the Highlands. He was captured on Loch Morar and beheaded at the Tower of London in April 1747, the last man in Britain ever executed by the axe.

On the north edge of the village stands St Mary's Church, a great red sandstone Gothic Revival pile designed by Joseph Aloysius Hansom - the man who also patented the Hansom cab - and paid for by Thomas Fraser, 12th Lord Lovat. It opened on Sunday 13 November 1864, the first proper Catholic chapel built in Beauly. In its grounds sits one of the oddest relics in the Highlands: a bullaun, or natural cup-stone, that the priests Charles and John Farquharson and Alexander Cameron used to baptise the faithful inside a cave at the Brae of Craskie in Glen Cannich during the Penal Laws - the years when being a Catholic priest in Britain could get you transported or hanged. Black Watch Captain Archibald Macrae Chisholm removed the stone from its cave in the nineteenth century to preserve it, and it now sits on a column at St Mary's, a small piece of Catholic Highland resistance turned into a memorial.

Beauly today is a village of around 1,365 people, on the Far North Line that runs from Inverness up to Wick and Thurso. Its railway station, built in 1862 and closed in 1960 during the Beeching cuts, was renovated and reopened in 2002 - one of the small reversals of fortune that has begun to remap rural Scotland. The village is best known among Highlanders for the Beauly Shinty Club, which has won the Camanachd Cup three times and was once World Champions of a sport almost nobody outside Scotland has heard of. In 2010 the Scottish government approved a controversial high-voltage line running from Beauly all the way south to Denny in Falkirk, designed to carry electricity from Western Isles wind farms - what Energy Minister Jim Mather called the most significant grid infrastructure project in a generation. Mary's beautiful place, eight centuries on, is still finding new things to be.