The name is Norse. Vik - bay. Three letters that tell you the Scandinavians got here first and stuck around long enough to name the harbour. Wick lies at 58.45 degrees north on the Caithness coast, where Scotland turns its shoulder to the North Sea and the wind reminds you why no one bothered building a railway here until the nineteenth century. The original town grew on the north bank of the river, a tight cluster of stone houses above a small harbour. It might have stayed that way - a quiet fishing community at the end of the road - except the herring moved. In the early 1800s the shoals that had once teemed off the Hebrides shifted northeast, and suddenly the seas around Wick boiled silver. The town did not so much expand as duplicate itself.

Across the river they built Pulteneytown, a planned fishing port designed by Thomas Telford for the British Fisheries Society. Engineers laid it out on a grid; coopers and curers and gutters filled it. By mid-century Wick was one of the busiest herring ports in Europe, the harbour so packed with boats you could supposedly walk across their decks from one side to the other. The fishwives - women who gutted the catch on the quay with knives moving faster than any eye could follow - earned their own quiet immortality in the town's memory. A rickety footbridge was the only connection between old Wick and new for years, an architectural insult that finally got replaced. The herring eventually moved on, as herring do, but the grid and the warehouses and the harbour walls remain - bones of a boom etched into the coast.

Six miles south of town, the cliff falls 250 feet to a hidden cove. There was no road. There was no harbour, exactly. There was just a slot in the rock where boats could land, and in the mid-eighteenth century someone cut 365 steps zigzagging down the face of it. After that, Whaligoe was a fishing port. The women carried the catch. Creels heavy with herring lashed to their backs, they climbed those steps from sea level to clifftop and walked the fish to market - a daily reckoning with gravity and weather that you simply cannot imagine until you have stood at the top and looked down. The fleet eventually moved elsewhere. The steps remain, free and accessible and mostly empty, and walking them is half the reason anyone comes.

Caithness is a landscape that keeps its prehistoric architecture in plain sight. The Grey Cairns of Camster are two 5,000-year-old chambered burial cairns - the Long and the Round - sitting unattended on a hillside where you can crawl inside on a wet Tuesday and have the place to yourself. The Hill o' Many Stanes has roughly 200 small stones arranged in rows on a Bronze Age moor, an alignment as mysterious as it is rare. Cairn o' Get is a well-preserved tomb tucked into the hillside above Whaligoe. None of these get the queues that Stonehenge does, which is part of their power. You arrive, you look, you wonder, and the wind keeps blowing the same way it has for fifty centuries.

Castle Sinclair Girnigoe perches on a clifftop promontory north of town, three sides ringed by sheer drop, the fourth defended by a ditch and curtain wall. It was built around 1470 by the Sinclair earls of Caithness, expanded and besieged and partly demolished in family feuds across two centuries, and finally abandoned. What remains is jagged, dramatic and utterly photogenic - tower stumps and arched windows opening onto sea. Just south, the Old Keiss Castle teeters on a different cliff edge, built around 1600 and abandoned in 1755 when its owners overspent on a new baronial pile they could not afford. The old castle is free and open at any hour. So is the cliff edge, which is a fair warning.