A traveller cannot go much farther north in the Scottish Highlands than Thurso, the end of the A9 road and jumping-off point for the Orkney islands.
Its remoteness was a factor in the UK government’s decision to build the Dounreay nuclear complex there, a post-World War II development that supplied power to the grid for nearly 20 years and, though in the process of a decades-long decommissioning, still looms like a sci-fi movie set over the surrounding coastal landscape.
