Attraction in Caithness

Dunrobin Castle near Golspie in Sutherland is the largest house in the Scottish Highlands, a fairytale castle of towers and turrets rising from its cliff-top position above the Dornoch Firth in a composition that combines the original medieval tower house with the nineteenth-century additions of Sir Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament, into one of the most visually striking architectural compositions in the Highlands. The castle is the ancestral seat of the Earls and Dukes of Sutherland and the combination of the extraordinary architecture, the lavish interior and the formal French-style garden creates a visitor experience quite unlike any other Highland castle. The interior of Dunrobin contains a remarkable collection of paintings, furniture and objects accumulated over five centuries of ducal occupation, the state rooms providing a comprehensive picture of the ambitions and tastes of one of the most powerful and most controversial aristocratic families in Scottish history. The Sutherland family was responsible for the Highland Clearances in Sutherland, the forced removal of thousands of crofting families from the inland glens to coastal settlements in the early nineteenth century in one of the most brutal episodes in Scottish social history. The formal garden below the castle, designed in the French style with precise geometric parterres visible from the castle windows and the cliff walk above, is one of the finest formal gardens in the Highlands and provides an elaborate planted contrast to the wild Highland landscape visible beyond its walls.

The Italian Chapel on Lamb Holm in Orkney is one of the most moving and most extraordinary small buildings in Britain, a chapel created by Italian prisoners of war interned on the island during the Second World War who transformed two Nissen huts using only the materials available to them into a devotional building of extraordinary beauty and artistic ambition. The chapel was created under the direction of Domenico Chiocchetti, an artist from Moena in the Italian Dolomines, whose skill and the devotion of the prisoner community produced one of the most remarkable acts of creative faith under adversity recorded in any conflict. The exterior of the chapel retains the outline of the original Nissen hut structure, to which a concrete facade in the form of a small Italian Romanesque church was added, the painted stonework trompe l'oeil columns and pilasters creating an illusion of solid masonry in a building that is essentially two corrugated iron tunnels. The interior, however, creates a completely successful illusion of an elaborate Italian devotional chapel, the painted walls and ceiling simulating brick vaulting, the painted window frames with their stained glass effects and the elaborate decorative programme of the altar area combining to create a space of genuine emotional power. The chapel remains in use for occasional services and is maintained by the Italian Chapel Preservation Committee, and the visit to this remote Orkney island to see what love, faith and artistic skill can achieve in the most constrained of circumstances provides one of the most genuinely moving heritage experiences in Scotland.

Maeshowe in the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site is one of the finest Neolithic chambered cairns in Europe, a passage tomb of approximately 2800 BC whose combination of the extraordinary precision of the drystone masonry, the winter solstice alignment illuminating the chamber at the shortest days of the year and the remarkable twelfth-century Viking runic inscriptions carved into the walls creates a monument of quite exceptional layered historical significance. Historic Environment Scotland manages the site and guided tours are required. The quality of the masonry at Maeshowe surpasses that of any other Neolithic monument in Britain, the large flat stones fitted with precision to create walls and a corbelled roof of remarkable structural elegance. The monument was built approximately 500 years before Stonehenge and the engineering knowledge required to align the passage with the winter solstice sunset demonstrates the mathematical abilities of Orkney's Neolithic builders with unusual clarity. The Viking runic inscriptions, carved by Norse explorers who broke into the tomb in the twelfth century, include some of the longest runic inscriptions in existence written in colloquial Norse. They range from boasts about treasure to descriptions of a woman recorded as the most beautiful in Orkney.

The Ring of Brodgar on the Mainland of Orkney is one of the largest and most impressive Neolithic stone circles in Britain, a ring of originally sixty standing stones set within a circular ditch cut from the bedrock approximately five thousand years ago on an isthmus between the Lochs of Stenness and Harray. Twenty-seven stones survive standing in a circle of over 100 metres diameter, their weathered flagstone pillars rising to varying heights from the closely mown grass of the archaeological site in a landscape of extraordinary quality and resonance. The Ring of Brodgar forms part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney UNESCO World Heritage Site alongside Skara Brae, Maeshowe chambered cairn and the Stones of Stenness. The monument was built in a position of considerable visual power, the isthmus between the two lochs framing the circle on either side with water and the wide Orkney landscape opening in every direction beyond. The choice of this specific location, neither the highest ground nor the most sheltered, implies that the relationship between the stone circle and the water on either side was deliberate and meaningful, the lochs perhaps representing boundaries between different conceptual domains in the cosmology of the builders. The deep ditch surrounding the circle, cut into the bedrock with antler picks, would have created an even more powerful sense of boundary and enclosure in its original form. The standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar are formed from the local Old Red Sandstone, which splits naturally into the flat-faced slabs that the Neolithic builders exploited for their monument stones throughout Orkney. Each stone has a distinctive shape and many bear later carvings by Viking settlers who added runic inscriptions and other marks to monuments already two thousand years old when they arrived.