Clashnessie ( gd, Clais an Easaidh) is a small

crofting Crofting is a form of land tenure and small-scale food production particular to the Scottish Highlands, the islands of Scotland, and formerly on the Isle of Man. Within the 19th century townships, individual crofts were established on the bette ...

community on the North-West coast of

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

; specifically in the

Assynt Assynt ( gd, Asainn or ) is a sparsely populated area in the south-west of Sutherland, lying north of Ullapool on the west coast of Scotland. Assynt is known for its landscape and its remarkable mountains, which have led to the area, along with ...

area of

Sutherland Sutherland ( gd, Cataibh) is a historic county, registration county and lieutenancy area in the Highlands of Scotland. Its county town is Dornoch. Sutherland borders Caithness and Moray Firth to the east, Ross-shire and Cromartyshire (later ...

. The

township A township is a kind of human settlement or administrative subdivision, with its meaning varying in different countries. Although the term is occasionally associated with an urban area, that tends to be an exception to the rule. In Australia, Ca ...

(the old Scottish term for a crofting village) is scattered around the sandy beach of Clashnessie Bay and derives its name from the Gaelic ''clais an easaidh'', meaning glen (clais) of the (an) waterfall (easaidh), referring to the waterfall at the head of the shallow glen in which most of the houses stand. Although north of

Inverness Inverness (; from the gd, Inbhir Nis , meaning "Mouth of the River Ness"; sco, Innerness) is a city in the Scottish Highlands. It is the administrative centre for The Highland Council and is regarded as the capital of the Highlands. Histori ...

, the village's micro-climate is generally mild, due to the closeness to the

Atlantic Ocean The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the " Old World" of Africa, Europe ...

Gulf Stream The Gulf Stream, together with its northern extension the North Atlantic Current, North Atlantic Drift, is a warm and swift Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic ocean current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico and flows through the Straits of Florida a ...

. Today Clashnessie has just nineteen houses distributed widely over roughly a square mile area. Ten of these houses are original nineteenth-century crofters' cottages, or rebuilds, while the remaining nine are of more recent construction in a variety of styles. In the landscape around them are a number of the ruined traces of earlier dwellings and barns, the unmortared blackhouses of the crofters who were first cleared to the coast from more arable homelands in the interior. By the 1960s the resident population had fallen to around a dozen people, although within living memory Clashnessie had an inn, a post office, and a shop. The ruins of the community mill, of the kind with a horizontally mounted water-wheel, can still be seen at the side of the burn which runs down from the waterfall. The traces of the old poorhouse can still also be found on the roadside. Today the community is truly international. Although many houses have been decrofted, there has been some successful revival of traditional crofting too, with Highland cattle joining Cheviot sheep on the community's common grazing. Access to broadband has made cyber-crofting possible, which also adds to the long-term viability of the township.

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Brief details
* Populated places in Sutherland {{Highland-geo-stub