The road to Durness twists and turns along the rugged coast and over the hills - 100 miles from Inverness, 65 from Thurso, much of it single track with passing places. The standing joke is that here, stray sheep dispute the right of way with mad bats in white vans. Bus 805 - the Durness Bus - leaves Inverness three times a week and takes three and a half hours. Bus 803 from Thurso runs on Saturdays. Mackay's filling station, opposite the Spar, pumps fuel 24 hours a day on card. It is the only fuel for many miles in any direction, and the locals will gently advise you to fill up at Ullapool or Thurso first if you can. There is no ATM in the village. The signal is 4G if you have EE, O2, or Vodafone. 5G has not yet reached the north coast.

A mile west of the village, on a peninsula called Balnakeil, sits one of the strangest cultural complexes in Britain. Built as an early-warning radar station during the Cold War, the buildings were abandoned, then quietly handed over to craftspeople in the 1960s. Today Balnakeil Craft Village hosts Cocoa Mountain - probably the country's most northerly chocolate makers - alongside Balnakeil Glass, The Wee Gallery, and a scattering of other studios open from May to October. Just along the peninsula stands the ruin of Old St Peter's church, built in 1619 over the foundations of much earlier churches and abandoned in 1814. Viking remains, including human bodies, have been uncovered around Balnakeil as the dunes shift. The same wind that drives the chocolatiers' visitors back to their cars also strips away centuries of sand to reveal what was there before.

Smoo Cave sits at the foot of the cliffs just east of the village, and you can walk into it without ticket or guide. The outer cavern is one of the largest sea cave entrances in Britain. An inner chamber holds a waterfall plunging through a sinkhole in the roof. The cave was used in prehistory, in the medieval period, and probably as a smuggler's hideout in between. Above the cave, the North West Highlands Geopark covers Durness, Kinlochbervie and Kylesku, and some of the bedrock here is over three billion years old - some of the oldest exposed rock in Europe. From Durness you can also catch the ferry across the Kyle of Durness for the eleven-mile minibus ride to Cape Wrath, or hike the unsigned, unsupported Cape Wrath Trail back to Fort William: 200 miles of bog, weather, and waymark-free wilderness.