There are a handful of places we find ourselves coming back to no matter what else is on the map, and Findhorn is near the top of the list. It is, without much argument between the two of us, one of our favourite places in the whole of the UK, and the beach is most of the reason why. A long, open stretch of pale sand on the North Sea, with room enough that even a busy day still feels like you have it mostly to yourselves.
The beach huts
The first thing you meet, up above the sand, is the row of beach huts, painted every colour someone could find a tin of. They are wonderful. They carry the whole memory of a certain kind of British seaside holiday in them, the days when a week at the coast was the great escape, when families packed up and came to places exactly like this to sit in the wind and be thoroughly happy about it. Standing in front of them you can almost hear the deckchairs and the flasks of tea. Some things, thankfully, do not change much.
Miles of sand and hardly a soul
What we love most is that you can walk for miles here and pass almost no one. The beach just keeps going, and the further you go the more it belongs to you, the whole soundtrack narrowing down to wind and water and the occasional gull making its opinion known. It is the kind of walking that empties your head in the best way. You set off meaning to go as far as the first marker and end up a mile past it before you remember you have to walk all the way back.
A dog’s idea of heaven
It is also, unmistakably, a dog’s happy place. You can spot the exact moment they realise where they are, the little electric change that comes over them as the sand opens up and they understand what is about to happen. Then it is balls thrown and fetched and thrown again, tireless and joyful, the same delighted sprint a hundred times over as though each one were the first. We are not dog owners ourselves at the moment, but we have spent many a Findhorn walk grinning at other people’s, who have plainly arrived in paradise.
Eating in the salt air
And then there is the eating. There is something about food in sea air that no kitchen can quite match. Everything tastes better with a bit of salt on the wind and the North Sea in front of you, whether it is a proper spread or just a sandwich and a flask, cold fingers wrapped around a warm cup. We have had some of our simplest and best meals sitting out here, watching the light change over the water, in no hurry at all to be anywhere else.
We always leave Findhorn a little reluctantly, already half planning the next time before we have reached the van. Some places you visit. A few you keep. This one, with its bright huts and its endless sand and its overjoyed dogs and its salt-air suppers, is firmly one we keep.
Travelling this stretch of coast by van? Here is where we park at Findhorn and the sunset walk we do most evenings.
Findhorn is one of many places we have written about north of the border. Find them all in our Scotland journal.
