Day 283 Wednesday 25 Jul 2007 Thurso to Inchmore, Scotland

A grey blustery morning as we leave Thurso for John o’Groats, reputedly the most northerly inhabited place on the UK mainland where we take a cruise on the Pentland Firth to see seals and puffins. The weather clears miraculously as we step aboard the little boat in the tiny harbour but the seas haven’t abated so its quite a rough trip around the cliffs of a nearby island. There are plenty of seals and a few puffins, guillemots and kittiwakes but apparently the birds which normally cover the cliffs with their nests in their millions arrived early this year before the fish they depend upon so they abandoned their eggs and moved on leaving only a few stragglers to greet the tourists.

We moved on too, down the east coast towards Inverness where we found a little inn in Inchmore just outside the city.