PHOTO: CHRIS DUCKHAM


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Chris Duckham on the forage for ingredients


of the dishes, are remarkably low. “The foraged bits don’t cost anything. The broth at the moment is made from mackerel bone stock and we get given mackerel – people go fi shing, they get too many mackerel and they throw some at me. We buy the lobsters from a local fi sherman and we often get the crabs free, because otherwise they just chuck them back.” Untrained as a chef, Chris got the fi ne dining bug while helping out in a friend’s restaurant many years ago. Unperturbed by an appearance on Masterchef in 1992, where he got knocked out in the fi rst televised round, when he and his wife Tina moved up to the Highlands with their two children, they decided to make a go of it. First they rented a room in the local pub one


night a week, but after moving into a former guest house, with a good-sized dining room and kitchen and a separate entrance, they decided to expand their horizons. Chris handles the sourcing of the food –


including foraging for wild herbs, heather sorrel and mushrooms on the hillside, and gathering sea lettuce below the tide line – as well as the prepping and all the cooking. Tina does the rest, from the meeting-and-greeting to the service and the post-prandial bottle-washing.


Work/life balance Seven years on, the result is plenty of bookings, a slew of eff usive fi ve-star reviews on TripAdvisor and an entry in this year’s Michelin Red Guide. Naturally, he’s extremely pleased with the way things have turned out. “It is busy


this year. I’m surprised, given the recession and the fact that some of the holiday cottages aren’t as busy as they normally are. But word has got around and folk are beating a path to our door.” Most of their guests come from a distance,


either tourists staying in holiday cottages in the area or people who drive up and spend the night in a local B&B. But some locals come too and it is not unknown for Chris’s patients to come and experience the other side of his dual career. It’s all quite a change from the life he had in


Lincolnshire, where he worked as a GP after studying and training in his home town of Leeds. The move north came about after a frank assessment of his work–life balance. “I was getting completely burnt out,” he says. “I was seeing 60 patients a day and it was completely nuts. I never used to see the kids and I felt like one of those hamsters on a wheel and thought, it’s time for a change.” The practice in Tongue, where he works on a


job-share three days a week, is considerably quieter but the remoteness does bring its own challenges. The nearest hospital is 45 miles away in Thurso, it’s three hours in the ambulance to Inverness and the number of support staff is small. “When you’re on call, you’re it really,” he says. The remoteness has another, indirect eff ect.


Because of the lack of employment opportunities, young people tend to move away. Added to the fact that people often retire to the area, it means the number of elderly


patients is very high. “Apart from one other practice, which I think is in Lewis, at Tongue we have the highest percentage of over-75s and over-85s of any other practice in the UK.” As a result, he says, his patients “often have


multiple co-morbidities but then thankfully, because we are never that busy at Tongue, you get a bit more time to spend with them”. Running a restaurant no matter how small


or how infrequently, takes time and energy and he couldn’t manage it if he wasn’t able to take half-days on Wednesdays and Fridays. But the employment situation for doctors in this part of the world allows him to do this. “I’m quite lucky like that. For my sessions in Thurso, as I am in eff ect a locum, I can dictate my terms. So during the season I can say I want to do half-days but come October when the restaurant closes I will do full days again.” It’s exactly the kind of breathing space he


was looking for when he decided to up sticks and move to the far north, and it has given him the chance to combine the two things he loves, medicine and cooking, into one well-stirred pot.


Adam Campbell is a freelance writer and regular contributor to MDDUS publications.


Côte du Nord, The School House, 2 Kirtomy, Nr Bettyhill, Sutherland KW14 7TB t: 01641 521773 e: dine@cotedunord.co.uk


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