Hay's Way: Katharine arrives in the village of Badbea on the north east coast

The Scotsman

Rural Affairs correspondent Katharine Hay is walking around Scotland. This week she has arrived at the ruins of the village of Badbea on the north east coast

Transcript

00:00Hi, I've been walking some of the John O'Groats trail on my way north as I work through the

00:25Highlands documenting the North Coast 500, the impact of tourism, both positive and negative,

00:31but also looking at routes which are encouraging slow tourism, the John O'Groats trail being

00:37one of them. It's still a work in progress, there are some areas that are still quite

00:41challenging to walk through, but the team behind developing it are working on making

00:47it more accessible. One of the places that I've come across on the route is Bad Bay,

00:53which is where I am just now. I arrived here quite late last night walking from Helmsdale

00:58and it's one of the historic Highland Clearances villages. It's about five miles north of Helmsdale

01:08and as you can see behind me, there's remains of the homes that families, after they were

01:14cleared off the land in Sutherland and Caithness to make way for sheep farming, they came here

01:22and tried to make a life work for them. I think from what I was reading earlier, there

01:27were about 12 families at this specific site. They had challenging circumstances, you're

01:37right on the edge of the cliff here. The land does slope quite a bit, it was pretty difficult

01:45camping here last night trying to find somewhere where it wasn't just going to be all the blood

01:50running to one side of my body. But yeah, also just the wind, it's obviously very exposed.

01:56But again, from what I was reading, families lived in these homes with the livestock that

02:03they brought with them to try and work the land. I also saw that they had to tie the

02:08animals and children as well to the land sometimes because the weather was just against them

02:14a lot of the time. Camping near them was almost quite a haunting experience because after

02:19reading the history and just hearing about how difficult it was for them after they were

02:24cleared from their homes, this was sort of in the 1800s, it must have been very challenging

02:32circumstances for them. And yeah, it's just also a very beautiful spot. I mean, that doesn't

02:39take away from what they had to face, but it's very beautiful to walk through this area.

02:45The heather's out in bloom at the moment and you get a very wide view of the east coastline

02:51as well, which has been pretty spectacular to walk along. I'm just carrying on on the

02:56John O'Groats trail on my way north. I'll be hopefully getting up to Burydale in the

03:02next hour or so and just going to be continuing on my way north towards John O'Groats.

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