Norseman Hotel

The Norseman is the Wick property of the Caithness Collection, a small Highland-managed group of three hotels covering Wick, Castletown and Thurso. It sits on Riverside in the centre of Wick, on the south side of the river a hundred yards from the harbour and the start of the Wick Heritage Trail.

Wick is the natural eastern hub of Caithness. At its herring-fishing peak in the early 1860s the harbour worked over 1,100 boats during the season, for a few weeks each summer, Wick was statistically the busiest herring port in Europe, and the buildings around Pulteneytown (the planned fishing-station extension laid out by Thomas Telford in 1808) carry the architectural record. The Wick Heritage Museum at the harbour is the place to put the history together; the surviving Old Pulteney distillery a few streets in is the other side of the same era.

The Norseman is the family-run end of the Wick stay options, rooms above a ground-floor bar and restaurant, with the practical small-hotel feel of a place that’s been worked by the same operator across years. Wick is now the eastern gateway for the NC500 before the route turns inland for Helmsdale and the Sutherland coast.

Sister hotels are the Castletown Hotel near Dunnet Head and the Pentland Hotel in central Thurso. Current rates and reservations at the Caithness Collection website.