Coylumbridge

Where the waters meet

The B970 crosses the River Druie on a road bridge here, immediately downstream of where the Luineag and the Gleann Einich water run together to make it. Coylum means narrow leap; Luineag, dancing bubbling stream. This is a small pinewood hamlet. The Coylumbridge Resort Hotel, which Rothiemurchus Estate granted sixty-five acres in 1964, opened with its bunkhouse the following year to catch the new Cairngorm ski trade.

The Woodshed is the hotel's log-cabin bar, an original 1965 feature given a refurbishment in 2006. It pours local ales and whiskies, runs live music, and puts out pizza, nachos and an outdoor barbecue on selected days. The Foyer Bar is the quieter room, sofas and a fire, with a designated area where dogs are allowed. The hotel's real ale is Cairngorm Trade Winds, kept on the hand pump in the main bar.

For coffee there is the Nook, a lounge that doubles as a small gift shop selling Scottish odds and ends alongside speciality coffees, hot chocolate, cakes, soup and sandwiches.

Coffee and estate produce

The food shopping is at the Rothiemurchus Centre. The farm shop sells Highland beef and venison reared and prepared on the estate, rainbow trout when it is in season, heather honey, homemade haggis and black pudding, home-cured bacon, pies, pâtés, sausage rolls and quiches, artisan cheese, jams and chutneys. Opposite it, the Barn Café keeps a wood-burning stove and bike racks and serves bacon, sausage or vegetarian breakfast rolls, soup of the day, and Cullen skink with a homemade cheese scone. The coffee comes from the Perth Bean Shop, and dogs are welcome inside.

Coylumbridge is where you begin the Lairig Ghru, which Walkhighlands calls the best known hill-pass in Scotland. It is the through-route to the Linn of Dee: nineteen miles, eight to ten hours, climbing to 835 metres at the top of the pass. The first stretch is a clearer, easier approach through mature pinewood, past the 1912 Cairngorm Club Iron Bridge and the Piccadilly path junction, before it grows rougher higher up into glacial moraine, exposed mountain and the Pools of Dee. It is graded 4, help is distant, and winter snow is common. The approach woods hold capercaillie, so dogs go on a short lead between the start of April and mid-August.

For something shorter, the Loch an Eilein circuit is four and a quarter miles of good lochside path, about two hours, through pinewood with red squirrels and crested tits and a ruined castle on its island. Jacobites besieged that castle in 1690, and after Culloden a woman named Jean Gordon, known as Grizel Mhor, sheltered fugitives there.

Passes, pinewoods and play

Families staying at the resort have a three-level treehouse soft-play with a toddler zone, an outdoor playground with a zip line and rope swings, an eighteen-hole castle-themed adventure golf course, an arcade and an indoor pool. A separately run Outdoor Discovery Centre adds a climbing wall, trampolines, tennis, laser tag, high ropes and bike and ski hire, though what it charges and when it opens are handled on its own terms.

The estate church, Rothiemurchus Old Church, stands a little outside the hamlet, roofless and gutted now. Sir J. P. Grant rebuilt it in 1830 on the site of an older one; it has a symmetrical four-bay front, square-headed windows and a pedimented bellcote, and beside it the Grant of Rothiemurchus burial enclosure is ringed with spearhead railings, most of its tombs from the last two centuries.

There was once a railway. In 1917/18 the War Office laid a three-foot-gauge timber line from Aviemore, running beside the road, crossing the Druie on a bridge made from felled tree trunks and following the Luineag through the pines. It carried forestry workers, and the trains stopped at Coylumbridge to take on water. The felling is thought to have ceased sometime in 1922.

Church, railway and connections

Aviemore station is about three kilometres off, staffed, with a bus stop at the front. The Stagecoach service 30 runs up to hourly from there through Coylumbridge, with luggage space aboard for skis and bikes, and the A9 is roughly two miles beyond the wider Rothiemurchus turnings.

Some of the oldest Scots pines in Rothiemurchus Forest are more than three hundred years old, and the walk up to the pass goes out through the same forest.