Durness

Smoo Cave swallows a waterfall through its roof — water plunging from the clifftop stream into a triple-chambered limestone cavern that opens to the sea. Durness sits on Scotland's far north coast, where a band of limestone paints a rare green landscape across the otherwise brown peatlands.

Durness is the British mainland's most north-westerly village, set on a limestone outcrop that feeds richer grass than the peat-covered gneiss around it. Smoo Cave is both sea cave and freshwater cave: the first chamber is large enough to park a bus in, the second holds the waterfall, and the third lies beyond flooded passages reached only by boat when conditions allow. Balnakeil Beach runs white sand toward a ruined church where the grave of Donald MacMurdo, a seventeenth-century killer, is marked by a skull-and-crossbones headstone. John Lennon spent childhood summers here visiting family — a connection the village wears with quiet pride — and the old radar station above the bay has become a craft village — the far north's improbable bohemia.