Pentland Hotel

The Pentland is the Thurso end of the Caithness Collection, a town-centre hotel on Princes Street, a short walk from Thurso’s seafront and from the harbour at Scrabster, two miles west, where the NorthLink ferry sails to Stromness on Orkney. It is the largest of the three Caithness Collection hotels and the natural base for visitors using Thurso as a staging post for an Orkney crossing.

Thurso is the most-northerly town on the British mainland and the western anchor of Caithness. The old burgh sits behind the seafront, with the fourteenth-century St Peter’s Kirk ruin at the river mouth and the small but informative North Coast Visitor Centre on the High Street covering the area’s geology, archaeology and Norse history. Thurso Beach itself is one of the better-known cold-water surfing spots in Europe, the reef breaks at the east end of the bay produce serious swell during winter Atlantic storms and the British Open Surfing Championships have been held here.

The hotel offers rooms, restaurant and bar in the standard town-hotel pattern. Paired with the Castletown Hotel (for Dunnet Head) and the Norseman in Wick (for the east coast and the Wick herring history), the three Collection properties make a workable single-chain sweep across the county.

Current rates, restaurant and reservations at the Caithness Collection website.