The Far North Line has a bit of everything.
First you're right on the edge of a sweeping firth with seals rearing their heads through the water, the Black Isle in the background. Then you slide through rolling farmland with Ben Wyvis looming up to the west. Past Tain, the Dornoch Firth winds under the Bonar Bridge to become the Kyle of Sutherland, which you cross to Lairg via a green-painted latticed viaduct. The purpley heather-streaked hills at Pittentrail provide shelter for the station's platforms. Loch Fleet, home to pine martens and Scottish crossbills, is passed as the Moray Coast comes into view; beyond that, Aberdeenshire. The train curls round the hammered shod of the bay at Brora, where cormorants crowd on the rocks, patiently drying their wings.
The train is practically on the shingle as Helmsdale approaches - then it's lush Strath Ullie, known by the Vikings as Hjalmundal, where deer skulk in the woodlands and people panned for gold in the streams. At Forsinard, where the pretty blue-painted station is now an RSPB visitor centre, the landscape opens up into the bleak Flow Country; the largest stretch of blanket peat bog in Europe at least. At Scotscalder it returns to farmland - albeit punctured by the River Thurso and Wick River - and our journey ends a mere ferry ride away from the wonderful Orkney Islands.
