Ulbster Arms Hotel

The Ulbster Arms is in the centre of Halkirk, six miles south of Thurso on the River Thurso. It has been a sporting hotel for well over a century, Halkirk was once one of the major salmon-fishing stations in the north of Scotland, and the hotel built its trade on syndicates of rods taking long weeks along the river through the summer. The River Thurso remains a working salmon fishery, and a substantial slice of the hotel’s bookings still come from fly anglers; the river beats are managed by the Thurso Fisheries Board and the hotel sells day-tickets and longer permits in season.

Halkirk is a planned village laid out by Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster in the late 1790s, a grid of streets unusual in this part of Scotland that gives the village an open, ordered character. Sinclair’s wider work was bigger: the first Statistical Account of Scotland, compiled parish by parish in the 1790s, was his project, and remains the foundational social-history record of the country at that moment.

The hotel sits on Bridge Street near the river and is roughly equidistant from Thurso, Wick and the Caithness coast at Dunnet Bay, a useful touring base for the far north without being in either of the two main towns.

Rooms, dining room and bar; the bar carries a working village trade alongside the hotel custom. Current rates, fishing arrangements and dinner booking at the Ulbster Arms website.