There is no easy way into Kinlochbervie. From Inverness it is a slow drive of three hours or more, north on the A9 past Tain, then northwest through Bonar Bridge and Lairg, then out along the A838 to Laxford Bridge and Rhiconich. From Rhiconich you branch onto the B801, a five-mile single-track lane that ends at the village. The road continues briefly westward, still single-track with passing places, out to the beaches of Oldshoremore and Sheigra before degenerating into farm track. The Durness Bus 805 runs the route from Inverness three or four days a week, taking two and a half hours, and the schoolday-only 890 reaches Ullapool. The North Coast 500 driving route passes nearby, but the village itself remains slightly off it. The advantage is that almost nobody arrives by accident.

Outside the village hall stands a war memorial that commemorates one of the most remarkable lives produced by this parish. Robert McBeath was nineteen years old and a lance-corporal in the 1/5th Seaforth Highlanders when he led a single-handed assault on a German machine-gun position at the Battle of Cambrai on 20 November 1917. He killed two men, captured three officers and thirty soldiers, and cleared the way for his unit to advance. The Victoria Cross was awarded shortly afterwards. After the war he emigrated to Canada and joined the police in Vancouver. On 9 October 1922 he arrested a drunk driver, who pulled a gun and shot him dead. McBeath was twenty-three. The death sentence on his killer was eventually commuted to life imprisonment because the man had been so badly beaten in police custody that a judge thought a hanging would compound the injustice. McBeath is buried in Vancouver. His name is on the wall in Kinlochbervie.

On the east side of the village stands a plain, austere kirk, one of the so-called Telford churches. After the Napoleonic Wars, the British government voted to build new churches across England as thanksgiving for victory, but the Highlands were eventually allocated only as much money as had been spent on a single English parish. Out of that small sum, Thomas Telford - the engineer who had built Bonar Bridge - designed thirty-two austere parish churches to be built across the western Highlands and Islands. The Kinlochbervie one is officially the Scourie-Eddrachillis Parish Church and is still in use by the Church of Scotland. The design is intentionally simple: rectangular nave, plain windows, white walls. Telford was building infrastructure for a country that had been thinly evangelised and thinly served, where parishioners might otherwise drift to Roman Catholic mass - still technically illegal until 1829 - or to the new sects.

The most extraordinary place in the parish is one you cannot drive to. Sandwood Bay lies four miles north of the road end at Blairmore, reached only on foot across the moor. The path is rough but well-worn, and the walk takes about an hour and a half each way. At the end you reach a mile of pale sand with a freshwater loch trapped behind the dunes, framed by red sandstone cliffs and overlooked by the sea-stack Am Buachaille, 'The Shepherd'. At low tide on the southern end of the beach you may see the engine block of a wrecked Spitfire that ditched here during the war. The pilot, by all accounts, walked away without injury. A local farmer insisted to his dying day in 1944 that he had once encountered a mermaid sunning herself on the rocks here. The bay is that kind of place. The wind is constant and the silence behind the wind is enormous.

Continue north from Kinlochbervie via Durness and you reach Cape Wrath, the northwestern tip of the British mainland, accessible only by a small ferry across the Kyle of Durness and then a jolting minibus across the Ministry of Defence training range. The whole northwest of Sutherland, from Kinlochbervie out to Cape Wrath and east to Durness, lies within the North West Highlands UNESCO Global Geopark. The rocks underfoot include some of the oldest exposed strata in Europe, more than three billion years old. The Lewisian gneiss that forms the bedrock of much of this country is grey, glassy, and folded into impossible shapes by time and pressure. Stand on the headland above Sandwood and you are standing on stone that was already ancient when the earliest forms of complex life were emerging. The village at the road's end has been there for a moment. The rocks were there before the moment began.