Calvine

A village between road and rail

The former Struan Inn still stands at Calvine, but you can no longer order a drink in it. The building now sleeps up to eight across four en-suite bedrooms as a self-catering lodge, and public bar and restaurant service is no longer offered. The small shop and the garage also closed, both several years before Struan Primary School was mothballed in 2011. What is left is a scatter of houses pinched between two lines of traffic: the A9 Perth to Inverness trunk road along the north, the Highland Main Line along the south.

For food you drive. House of Bruar sits about a mile and a bit up the road, a country store with a butchery, delicatessen, bakery and other food-hall departments, all under one roof: Aberdeen Angus beef, venison, handmade sausages and burgers, black pudding, haggis, Scotch eggs, British charcuterie, cheeses and whisky. Its restaurant is a self-service country kitchen under a glass conservatory, doing homemade soup, handmade pies, roast pork, Perthshire lamb and, on Sundays, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and a house peppercorn sauce.

Food and a working bar nearby

For an actual bar you go five miles south to Blair Atholl, where the Atholl Arms keeps the Highland Bothy beside the railway station. The menu leans into the region: cullen skink, haggis bon bons with Arran mustard, North Sea haddock in real-ale batter, a steak-and-ale pie, haggis, neeps and tatties, and a Highland game madras made with pheasant, rabbit and venison. Dogs are welcome so long as they stay on leads and off the furniture.

The walking starts at House of Bruar. The Falls of Bruar circuit is a mile and a half, an hour or so of climbing beside a gorge to a run of pools and waterfalls, two stone bridges and the ruin of a Victorian viewing-house. The planting you walk through began with a petition from Robert Burns. In 1787 he addressed the Duke of Atholl on behalf of the then-treeless falls, asking for "lofty firs and ashes cool", and the pines went in in 1796.

Falls, moor and the long hill day

Longer legs can take the waymarked Glen Banvie and Bruar circuit from Old Bridge of Tilt, ten miles across woodland and open moor with a Gothic folly called the Whim and views to Blair Castle and Schiehallion. Glen Bruar also gives walkers a back approach to Beinn Dearg, a 1,008-metre Munro and a full hill day rather than an afternoon.

South of the village at Old Struan, the church stands on a knoll where the River Garry meets Errochty Water. The present building dates from 1828, a plain Gothic rectangle of rubble with its original glazing and a small porch; the interior was rebuilt entirely in 1938. In the churchyard lies the site of the medieval St Fillan church, and inside is a seventh-century Pictish stone carved with a double-disc-and-Z-rod symbol. The old iron Bell of Struan rang here until it was swapped for a newer one; A. K. Bell bought it at the Lude sale in 1939 and gave it to Perth Museum.

Old Struan's stones and stories

Calvine, pronounced cal-veen, also lent its name to a photograph. In August 1990 two men working at a Pitlochry hotel said they had taken six pictures of something over the moorland above the village. A print passed through the Daily Record to the MoD, and an RAF press officer, Craig Lindsay, kept a copy for thirty-two years before handing it to Sheffield Hallam University in 2022. What the pictures show has never been settled.

There is no station in Calvine; the nearest is Blair Atholl, five road miles south, with step-free access to both platforms but no lifts. The council's 83 bus links the hamlet with House of Bruar, Blair Atholl, Killiecrankie and Pitlochry, the last of these twelve miles down the road and the nearest substantial visitor-services centre.

Connections and the medieval footprint

Behind the church, in the grass to the south, the faint foundations of its medieval predecessor are still there if you know to look for them.