Tain claims the title of Scotland's oldest royal burgh - chartered in 1066, the same year a Norman duke crossed the Channel and changed England forever. The town grew up around the shrine of St Duthac, an 11th-century Celtic saint whose relics drew pilgrims from across Scotland. King James IV was one of them. He came here repeatedly between 1493 and 1513, riding north each year to venerate Duthac at a sanctuary that conferred both spiritual and legal protection - cross the sanctuary line and you could not be arrested for debt or other civil offences. The Pilgrimage gallery at Tain Through Time tells this story. The medieval Collegiate Church still stands, weathered but solid, and the burgh's road layout still funnels visitors toward its door.

On the northern edge of town stand the tallest pot stills in Scotland - 26 feet 3 inches from base to neck, said to be the height of a giraffe. They belong to Glenmorangie, founded in 1843 on the site of an earlier brewery, and their height gives the spirit space to breathe. Only the lightest, most refined vapours reach the top before condensing. The result is the smooth, fruit-and-honey whisky that has made Glenmorangie one of the world's bestselling single malts. The visitor centre is walking distance from the town centre - which is exactly what the Wikivoyage entry recommends as the proper plan for a day in Tain.

On 16 August 1809, the ferry crossing the Dornoch Firth was overcrowded with people flocking to the Tain Lammas fair. It capsized. Ninety-nine drowned. The disaster prompted Thomas Telford to bridge the Kyle of Sutherland upriver at Bonar Bridge in 1812, but that route added miles, and the ferry continued running from Meikle Ferry Point until 1957. In 1991 the Dornoch Firth Bridge finally took the A9 across by the most direct line. Drive out to the Meikle Ferry today and you find a breezy spit of grass and a narrow lane with no parking - just the wide grey firth where one of Scotland's worst peacetime drowning disasters happened on a summer afternoon.

Drive south or east from Tain and you find Pictish carved stones in every village. The Shandwick Stone, raised around 780 AD, stands behind glass against frost as much as vandals. The Hilton of Cadboll Stone is one of the finest Pictish slabs ever carved - the original is in Edinburgh now, with a replica on site. At Nigg, the 8th-century Nigg Stone sits inside the 18th-century parish church; in the graveyard, the Cholera Stone marks where an elder once threw a blanket over a puff of mist he took for cholera and pinned it down with a rock. At Portmahomack, the 9th-century St Colmóc's Church houses a museum on the site of a Pictish monastery destroyed by Vikings in 800 AD. Tarbat Ness lighthouse, built by Robert Stevenson in 1830, climbs 174 feet above the cliffs.

The world's first ATM was the invention of a man from a village near Tain. John Shepherd-Barron (1925-2010), born in India to a Scottish family and raised in nearby Portmahomack, devised the Barclay cash dispenser, first installed in Enfield, London in June 1967. Withdrawals were capped at £10, which Shepherd-Barron later said was "quite enough for a wild weekend." The system used radioactive cheque-like tokens rather than magnetic cards, was quickly superseded, and changed banking forever. There are ATMs outside the High Street banks in Tain. There should be.