There is an unsettling irony in the name of this village. Bettyhill was named for Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland - "Betty" to her family - and she is the same Countess of Sutherland whose factors and constables oversaw the Strathnaver Clearances of the early 19th century, the systematic burning and eviction of the Highland tenants who had lived along the River Naver for generations. The village exists because those people were driven down to the coast to scrape a living from fishing on land their landlord considered marginal. They were the ones who built Bettyhill, on a hill that already carried, by accident or by deliberate insult, her name.
Bettyhill sits on the A836, 32 miles west of Thurso and 12 miles from Tongue, in the parish of Farr. The population today is 576. To the south, the River Naver runs down from Loch Naver to empty into Torrisdale Bay, one of the broadest and most photographed beaches on the north coast. The Naver is a renowned salmon river. The Farr Bay Inn, built in 1819 as the parish manse and now a listed building, sits among the houses. The Bettyhill Hotel contains the Eilean Neave restaurant. The craft shop serves fish and chips on Friday and Saturday nights, and the cafe runs seven days a week in summer. There is a school, a leisure centre, a swimming pool, a sauna - all the things a small north-coast community needs to keep its young people from drifting south.
The Strathnaver Museum sits in the former parish church at the centre of the village, and almost everyone in the Highland diaspora knows about it. It is the museum that tells, in detail, what happened in the glens behind Bettyhill between roughly 1814 and 1820 - when Patrick Sellar and the other agents of the Sutherland Estate carried out the most notorious of the Highland Clearances. Tenants were burned out of their homes, sometimes with the elderly still inside; entire townships were emptied to make way for Cheviot sheep. The people who survived were resettled on tiny coastal lots like the one Bettyhill occupies, where soil was thin and the sea was the only real resource. The museum holds the upper floor as "The Mackay Museum," preserving the older clan history of the whole north-western Highlands - from Assynt to Cape Wrath and from Loch Shin to Strath Halladale - the swath known as Mackay Country since the 13th century.
Bettyhill holds an annual football tournament called the Guy Cup. Teams from villages along the north coast - the kind of villages where you might raise a side of eleven only if everyone shows up - gather for a single competition each summer. The cup is held in memory of Philip Mackay, known to everyone as Guy, who died in an oil-rig accident. The medals and trophy are normally kept by Guy's mother Phyllis. It is the kind of local memorial that says more about a place than any official history. In a village whose name commemorates the woman who scattered its founders, the tournament that the people of Bettyhill chose to organise is named for one of their own - a son lost to the North Sea, remembered every year by his neighbours playing football for a cup his mother holds.
Located at 58.53 degrees north, 4.22 degrees west, on the A836 coastal road. Nearest controlled airfield is Wick (EGPC) approximately 35 nautical miles east; Inverness (EGPE) is about 80 miles south. From the air the village sits above the broad pale arc of Torrisdale Bay, with the River Naver winding inland to the south through cleared glens that still show the outlines of pre-Clearance settlements. The dark mass of Ben Loyal rises south-west. The coast is exposed to the full North Atlantic - low cloud, frequent rain showers, and onshore winds are routine, and Torrisdale Bay can build heavy surf within hours of an offshore depression.