We keep telling ourselves we’ll move Walden on tomorrow, and then the tide goes out, the light turns gold over the Moray Firth, and we find one more reason to stay another night in Findhorn. A week has gone the way sand does, quietly, and mostly through our fingers.
Findhorn is a lazy little beachside village, the kind of place where the biggest decision of the day is whether to turn left or right along the sand. We’re parked at the motorhome stopover run by the TFVCC, a short, flat walk from both the beach and the village, close enough that we leave the van where it sits and go everywhere on foot.
Where we’re parked
The stopover makes an easy base: level, unfussy, and within walking distance of everything that matters here, the beach, the village shop, a coffee, and the little harbour where the dinghies swing on their moorings. For anyone routing a campervan or motorhome along this stretch of the Moray coast, it’s the sort of practical, welcoming spot that makes you want to linger rather than push on to the next thing. We haven’t started the engine in days.
The evening walk
The ritual that’s kept us here is the evening one. Most nights, as the day winds down, we walk out along the beach at sunset and find it almost entirely to ourselves, a wide, pale stretch of sand with the firth on one side and the dunes and marram grass on the other, and the light doing something a little different every time. Oystercatchers pick along the waterline, the air comes off the sea with a clean cold edge to it, and for long stretches the only footprints are our own.
It isn’t always gentle. Some evenings the walk is into a wind that means business, or a squall rolls in off the firth and sends us back to the van with wet jackets and the kettle on. But that’s the coast being honest with you, and you learn to take it as it comes. The good evenings are better for it.
The slow way to see the Scottish coast
This is how we’ve come to like the coastline best, not ticked off in a long day of driving, but settled into slowly from one quiet village, on foot, at the pace of the tide. Findhorn has made that easy: somewhere simple to park, a beach at the end of the lane, and a sunset to walk into most nights. We’ll move Walden on eventually. Just, we keep thinking, not tomorrow.
