The name is, frankly, a joke. In Scots slang a plook is a pimple, and The Plock is the small headland that shelters Plockton's harbour from the prevailing westerly weather. Whoever laid out the village in the 1810s seems to have decided that Plookton was perhaps not the most marketable name for a planned fishing settlement, so Plockton it became. The village was built as part of the wider rebuilding of the Highlands after the Clearances - a place for evicted crofters to start again, on a sheltered inlet of Loch Carron where the fishing might just sustain them. The harbour faces east, away from the worst Atlantic blows, which is why those cabbage trees survive and why the place still looks the way it does.

In the 1990s a BBC television crew arrived and started filming a series called Hamish Macbeth, starring Robert Carlyle as a small-town policeman with a fondness for soft drugs and harder cases. The fictional village was Lochdubh; the real village in every shot was Plockton. Carlyle wandered the same Harbour Street tourists wander now, past the same painted cottages and the same boats moored in the same bay. The series wrapped in 1997 but the village still gets visitors clutching DVD boxsets and asking where the police station was. Plockton has also doubled as background scenery for The Wicker Man and for several Inspector Alleyn Mysteries episodes. The light here is the reason - flat morning silver, golden late afternoon, the kind of light that makes even ordinary shots look like postcards.

A mile east of the village stands Duncraig Castle, a Scottish baronial pile built in 1866 by Alexander Matheson. Matheson made his fortune in the Chinese opium trade - the same vast and morally indefensible business that built fortunes for Jardine Matheson and many of the Highland gentry. His money paid for the turrets and the gardens and the views over Loch Carron. The castle has had a wandering life since: country house, hotel, briefly a girls' school, briefly empty, now a private residence again. You cannot tour it, but you can drive past and consider how much of the prettiest village in the Highlands was paid for by the opium dens of Canton.

Above the village is a curious ruin - the remains of a Free Kirk, the breakaway Presbyterian congregation that walked out of the Church of Scotland in the great Disruption of 1843. They built their kirk in a natural amphitheatre of rock and grass. The worshippers stood outside, exposed to the weather; the minister preached from a small wooden shed, which at least kept his sermon dry. It was used regularly until 1936 and is still occasionally pressed into service for weddings. The site is a scheduled ancient monument now, and you can see the walls and the steps cut into the slope. There is something almost theatrical about it - the way the land cups around to amplify a voice, the way faith was held outdoors in a country famous for its rain.

Sea Kayak Plockton runs trips suitable for beginners, with longer paddles for those happy in open water - the loch is mild enough most days, and seals appear with regularity. The Lochcarron Highland Games are held on the Attadale Estate in mid-July, and the Plockton Regatta runs for two weeks from late July, the whole village turning out for sailing races and street dancing on the final night. The Plockton Inn is the only real pub, with rooms upstairs and Plockton Brewery ales on tap. There is no shop. The nearest groceries are seven miles down the road at the Co-op in Kyle of Lochalsh. The trains from Inverness take two and a half hours via Dingwall, Achnasheen and Stromeferry, and the Plockton platform is a halt with no toilets, no machines, no fuss.