Find a decent place to eat above the culinary Mason-Dixon line that runs across the Pitlochry parallel and you are torn between the urges to yell its name from a convenient mountain top, or keep it to yourself lest the establishment be swarmed with metropolitan poseurs.

Now nobody is going to add the douce old town of Cromarty to a gourmet trail, but if you find yourself wandering its attractive little streets, it’s good to know there are superior victuals on offer.

Sutor Creek is one of those admirable restaurants that have defied the provincial traditions of Scottish catering. By which I mean that it tries to offer rather more ambitious fare than what can be defrosted from a giant chest freezer out back.

For the snacking crowd they prepare fresh pizzas. Otherwise the menu appears to have been kept narrow and simple so that emphasis can be given to the preparation and presentation. On my demanding table, comprising 10 degenerates and one discerning aesthete, virtually everybody was going for mussels followed by venison with roasted root vegetables.

In these days of Thai lasagne, it was a relief to find cuisine containing nothing that couldn’t be harvested from the immediate vicinity.

Once you are replete, Cromarty deserves at least a couple of days of your attention. If it seems at first to be another of those exquisitely pretty coastal backwaters, a tightknit fishing community, it has rather more of a backstory than is immediately apparent.

Made a royal burgh in 1264, it used to be a minor player in the old Hanseatic League, shipping in flax and hemp from St Petersburg and Riga for its textile mills, and trading with everybody from Sweden down to Portugal.

The remnants of the imposing mill houses give some sense of its former glories. These days, it’s a lovingly restored semi-heritage village, with plenty of vestiges of its 18th-century heyday, and the substantially older East Church, which retains a certain stern air of Reformation resilience.

At the eastern tip of the Black Isle, Cromarty gazes eastward towards Scandinavia, while enjoying a relatively sheltered aspect, withdrawn a little into the Moray Firth. If its remoteness from Scotland’s cities encouraged an independent spirit, it was hardly cut off from foreign influences.

Before Scotland succumbed to its puritanical streak, one lively 17th-century laird, Sir Thomas Urquhart, translated Rabelais and was a Europhile long before it became fashionable.

The imaginative Courthouse Museum will fill you in on Cromarty’s chequered history, although a couple of nights staying in the National Trust’s Lydia Cottage, converted from the old fire station, might give you a more tangible sense of what it was like to live here a century or so ago (if you ignore the DVD player in the living room).

It is perhaps pertinent that Cromarty’s most famous son is Hugh Miller, a depressive poet and theologian who ended up as one of the foremost geological authorities of his (Victorian) age. It is exhilarating following in his footsteps around the coast of the Cromarty Firth, out to Sutor Stacks, where you can gaze westward towards the beaches of Findhorn and Burghead. The path leads you out to the headland with spectacular views over the firths, before the high trail loops round to return you to Cromarty.

It takes a mere hour to wander the town, but a longer stay will be rewarded by the dramatic natural environment within immediate reach. In winter, the slopes and tracks are made for mountain-biking. You can hire everything you need in Cromarty, get a ride up to the trails and cycle down the slopes back into town.

In summer, it’s a popular spot for dolphin-watching, either with decent binoculars from land, or on a dolphin-watching tour from Cromarty. These are labelled ecotours — although it’s difficult to see anything particularly ecological about gunning around the firths in boats chasing sealife — part of Cromarty’s leisurely mutation into a tourist attraction.

It’s only halfway there at the moment, the town’s two public bars still being the sort of haunts where outsiders are subjected to quizzical appraisal. Although that is surely preferable to the town becoming a museum-piece preserved in aspic purely for the enjoyment of visitors.

If the pubs remain the sort of places to sink pints rather than linger over a bellini, at least the southern sophisticate is assured of a hospitable reception at Sutor Creek. Just try not to tell everybody about it, would you?

Details: First ScotRail (www.firstscotrail.com) fares to Inverness start at £35 from Glasgow or Edinburgh. From Inverness, Highland Country Buses (Rapson’s, www.rapsons.co.uk) run regular services to Cromarty (25 minutes).

The National Trust for Scotland (0131 243 9331, www.nts.org.uk) has the Lydia Cottage, sleeping four, in Cromarty available from £280 a week in winter to £465 in high season, with four-night midweek breaks from £180. The Kennels (www.lhhscotland.com/house/20.asp), a refurbished Georgian house, sleeps eight to 10 people with weekly prices ranging from £600 in low season to £870 in high season

Times recommends

• The HQ of the great morairaway.com villa scam: a postbox
• The bloggers' travel guide to. . . Copenhagen and Malmö
• A Devon holiday with mates - on a budget