Glenmore

Lochside setting and the Pine Marten

Loch Morlich has a beach: golden sand and the Cairngorms rising straight from the far shore. It is the highest beach in Britain, which is not a category with fierce competition, but the sand is real and so is the pine forest at its back. Glenmore sits along the loch's edge, a thin scatter of buildings among Caledonian pinewood at the foot of Cairn Gorm. There is a shop, a bar, a visitor centre, a reindeer herd and a great deal of forest.

The Pine Marten Bar + Scran is an alpine-style bar with a real fire and occasional live music. Its kitchen serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, including nachos, chicken wings, a chicken burger, a full breakfast, a vegan wrap, homemade cakes, and vegetarian and vegan choices. Three regular Cairngorm Brewery cask beers are Black Gold, a session stout at 4.4%; Trade Winds, a speciality beer at 4.3%; and Wildcat, a premium bitter at 5.1%. Dogs are welcome, and there is outdoor seating. It has the friendly, relaxed feel of a bar where ski boots are ordinary.

Shop, cafe and forest trails

Glenmore Shop shares its building with the bar. Small and family-run, it stocks groceries, camping gas, practical beach, snow and camping supplies, and ski and bike hire. The local community took over Glenmore Visitor Centre and Allt Mor Café in November 2024. The café serves coffee, cakes, breakfast rolls and lunches; the centre has indoor and outdoor dog-friendly seating, accessible toilets, bike parking, tools and a Bosch e-bike charger, alongside its car park.

Most people are here to walk. The Beach Trail is the gentle one — a mile and a half of wide gravel through pine, birch and alder along the Allt Mor burn to the sand. The Loch Morlich Trail loops the loch in about two hours, mostly on wide gravel with one steep ramp and two road crossings. Meall a' Bhuachaille rises to 810 metres above the forest for anyone wanting the open hill. The traffic-free Old Logging Way runs six miles from Aviemore to the visitor centre, about a forty-five-minute off-road cycle.

Watersports and outdoor training

Loch Morlich Watersports hires out paddleboards, kayaks, canoes, sailing boats and group katakanus on sheltered water suited to beginner kayaking. Up the road, Glenmore Lodge, founded in 1948, is Scotland's National Outdoor Training Centre and teaches more than ten disciplines; its founding purpose was to help people "discover their physical, mental, and spiritual potential in the outdoors."

Timber and wartime history

The forest carries its own history. The Duke of Gordon offered the chance to operate a timber business in Glenmore's forest in the 1780s, and the Glenmore Company floated logs down from the loch and built forty-seven ships from them, one of which they named Glenmore. During the war, Norwegian resistance fighters trained on these shores for raids on occupied Norway; their memorial stands outside the visitor centre.

The Cairngorm reindeer herd

The reindeer are the thing people remember. Reintroduced to the Cairngorms in 1952, the herd grazes more than ten thousand acres of hill, and small groups of named animals come down to the paddocks by the road. You can stand at the fence in the rain and watch them.