The Bruar Water runs down a steep wooded gorge just off the A9, and the building at its foot is a food hall. The House of Bruar keeps a butchery, a delicatessen, a bakery, a pantry and a smoked fish and meat counter under one roof. The butchery does Aberdeen Angus beef, venison, lamb, handmade sausages and burgers, homemade pies, black pudding and haggis. The deli adds cheese, charcuterie, pâtés and Scotch eggs. It is not a village shop so much as the whole village pretending to be one.
Next door is the restaurant, self-service, with a country-kitchen feel and a Victorian-style glazed conservatory. The counter runs to homemade soup, handmade pies, vegetarian quiches, traditional haggis, freshly fried fish, roast pork and locally sourced Perthshire lamb. On Sundays there is topside of beef with Yorkshire puddings and a homemade peppercorn sauce. You queue, you point, you sit among the glass and the potted plants.
Behind all of this is the reason anyone came here in the first place. The Falls of Bruar circuit is about two and a half kilometres, an hour to an hour and a half, with roughly 150 metres of climbing. The paths are clear but steep in places, and in others they run along the edge of a sheer drop into the gorge. You pass pools, a natural rock arch, two stone bridges and a series of waterfall viewpoints, with a picnic area to finish. Children need watching closely near the edge.
The woods you walk through were planted deliberately. In 1787 Robert Burns came, found the banks bare, and wrote a poem in the voice of the river itself, asking the Duke of Atholl to plant "lofty firs and ashes cool" for shade. The 4th Duke, known as Planter John, obliged from 1796, putting in Scots pine, larch and spruce over the following three years and laying out paths and rustic bridges as a wild garden. Much of the original planting came down in gales between 1879 and 1883; more was felled in the Second World War and replanted afterwards. Late-eighteenth-century paths broadly survive.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert came in 1844, Victoria carried up the steep paths in her garden chair. Turner visited, as did William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The physician Thomas Garnett, visiting in 1798, called the falls and their bridge "a scene truly sublime."
The nearest station is Blair Atholl, on the Highland Main Line, a short bus or car journey down the road. It is unstaffed, with waiting rooms, help points, six free parking spaces and no toilets. The falls sit just off the A9 by the B8079, and buses 83 and 87/887 link Bruar and Blair Atholl with Pitlochry, seven miles south and the nearest town of any size.
Blair Atholl itself has the castle, whose earliest record dates to 1269; it is home to the Atholl Highlanders, the only remaining private army in Europe. The Atholl Arms, beside the station, serves Cullen skink, mince and tatties and macaroni cheese in its Highland Bothy bar, dogs allowed on leads.
The rock arch on the path is a natural one, and the smaller of the two bridges is late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth-century rustic masonry. People have been stopping at that spot for more than two hundred years.