Crovie

No car has ever driven through Crovie — the village is one house wide, pressed between a cliff face and the North Sea with barely room for a person to walk between them. Front doors give onto a path where storm waves occasionally send spray clean over the rooftops.

Crovie is a single row of gable-ended cottages on the Aberdeenshire coast, built with their narrow ends to the sea because the shelf of land is too slim for anything wider. Supplies arrive on foot along the path from the car park at the western end — residents still barrow their shopping in. A devastating storm in 1953 drove most of the community up to Gardenstown on the clifftop, and Crovie never fully recovered its permanent population; many cottages now shelter visitors rather than fishermen — the village's way of keeping its lights on. The setting, wedged between vertical cliff and horizontal sea, is a geography so extreme that people instinctively lower their voices, and the clifftop walk east to Pennan crosses coastline barely changed since the herring boats left. This is a place to stay and listen, not to tick.