Coastwalk

Nigg Ferry → Hilton of Cadboll

Distance: 10.03 miles
Ascent: 272 metres
Duration: 3 hours 27 minutes

Stones
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At last we're picking up where we left off in September.

The bus driver was a little surprised when we asked for singles to Nigg Ferry since the ferry won't be running for another three months. He was even more shocked when we told him we were planning to walk in this weather. While the forecast was marginally better than yesterday, in practice it looked worse. The snow had settled across Nigg Hill so after climbing the excellent track to Castlecraig Farm we opted for the inland roads via Nigg village instead of trying to stick to the coast.

Taking this route gave us the opportunity to look at Nigg Old Church, which is a beautiful building with inventive woodwork. Nowhere else have I seen a raked bank of pews, or pews that can be transformed into communion tables by means of a couple of latches and slides.

Also in the churchyard is an otherwise unremarkable stone labelled the "Cholera Stone". During the 1832 cholera outbreak (the same one that wiped out half of Inver ten miles to the north), a church elder saw a mist rising from the graveyard and on deciding it was the cholera itself, threw a blanket over it and fixed the blanket in place with this stone. Hugh Miller of Cromarty relates this as an apocryphal tale in his contemporaneous 1834 work Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland but makes no comment as to the method's success or otherwise.

Inside the church is a carved Pictish cross-slab. We passed another one in-situ on the hillside south of Shandwick, protected from the elements in a modern glass case.

Shandwick, Ballintore and Hilton run into each other and are collectively known as the Seaboard Villages. They seem to have a thriving community with an artistic bent; a series of five sculptures in Ballintore reflects the local culture.

It was in these villages that we picked up a stone of our own, as has become custom when we cross a thousand mile boundary. Gretna is 4,000 miles behind us and possibly only about 3,000 miles ahead. We press on.