Wick is a harbour town at the mouth of its river on the Caithness coast. During the 19th-century herring boom it was one of the great fishing ports — over a thousand boats crowded the harbour in the 1840s — and Thomas Telford laid out the planned district of Pulteneytown across the river from 1808 to house the trade. Old Pulteney whisky is still distilled here. Wick has both a station and a small airport, so it’s a useful gateway to the far north-east.
