The name itself tells you what this village was for. Scourie comes from a Gaelic word for a sheiling, the stone shelters that shepherds and crofters built for the summer months when they drove livestock up to higher pasture. Sutherland is country that demands such arrangements. The 2011 census classified Scourie as Very remote rural, with an adult population of 132, sitting roughly halfway between Ullapool to the south and Durness to the north on a coast where settlements are measured by the handful rather than the hundred. Eddrachillis parish stretches around it in long fingers of sea-loch and bog, and Scourie Bay opens westward toward the Atlantic, sheltered just enough by Handa Island and the smaller skerries to give boats somewhere to ride out the worst of the weather.

Until the nineteenth century, Clan Mackay was the dominant family across this corner of Sutherland, and a junior branch held Scourie itself. In 1640 the village became the birthplace of Hugh Mackay, a Scottish soldier who left home young, found his way to the Netherlands, and rose through the service of William of Orange. When William sailed for England in 1688 to take the throne from his father-in-law, Mackay went with him. The following July, on a narrow pass in Perthshire, he commanded the government forces at the Battle of Killiecrankie against Jacobite Highlanders loyal to the deposed James VII. He lost the battle but his reputation survived it, and his career did too. The Mackays held their Scottish estates including Scourie until 1829, when the last of them were sold off. The name still rings through the area, in graveyards and on shopfronts, long after the lands changed hands.

A short row offshore from Tarbet, the next inlet north, lies Handa Island. It looks unremarkable from the mainland, a hump of moor rising from the sea, but the western side falls away in sandstone cliffs that draw one of Britain's great seabird colonies. Puffins burrow into the turf at the cliff top in early summer. Skuas hunt above the moor, sharp-winged and pirate-eyed, harassing the smaller birds until they drop their catch. Guillemots and razorbills line the ledges by the tens of thousands, packed shoulder to shoulder on rock that smells, at the height of the season, like nothing else in the natural world. The reserve is unmanned but open to anyone willing to take the small ferry across the sound, and a circular path of about four miles winds around the island for the price of an afternoon.

Scourie sits squarely on the North Coast 500, the 516-mile loop launched in 2015 to thread together the highlands' coastal villages under a single tourist banner. The route brought new attention to places like this that had long been overlooked, and the village now offers a twenty-one-room hotel, several bed and breakfasts, and a campsite for the summer surge. But the older pull here is the fishing. The land around Scourie is freckled with freshwater lochs holding wild brown trout, some of them in numbers and sizes that anglers travel a long way for. The estate, owned by Dr Jean Balfour until her death in 2023, has long managed the fishing rights as part of the wider working of the land. Beyond the season, the village quiets back down. Shinty matches at the local pitch and the home games of Scourie Football Club in the North Caledonian League fill what passes for a sporting calendar in this very small place.