Grantown-on-Spey

Traditional bars and a planned town

The Craig Bar, on Woodside Avenue, keeps its walls crowded with aviation photographs and model aircraft, and cooks its pies to order. Robbie and Beryl run it, the pool room sits apart from the main bar, and the beer garden has fire pits and tables under parasols. The house speciality is a range of Connoisseur Pies, served with chips and either beans or peas. A dog that comes in is given a Bonio and served before its owner.

Grantown-on-Spey is a planned town, laid out in 1765 around a broad central Square, and it still reads that way on the ground: a wide High Street, generous open space where the market once stood, and a High Street full of independent shops, with no large chain stores. Anagach Woods begin almost at the edge of the centre, and the River Spey makes a broad curve through riverside woodland just to the south. You can go from a shop counter to a pinewood path without getting into a car.

A good deal of the eating and drinking happens inside the town's hotels — the Grant Arms, Ben Mhor, Speyside and Garth all keep their bars open to non-residents. The Grant Arms, on the Square, was built in 1765 — Queen Victoria stayed in September 1860 — and now organises itself around birdwatchers, running its own Bird Watching and Wildlife Club. Its Capercaillie Bar carries more than 135 whiskies and rotates local guest ales, with Cairngorm Trade Winds the usual cask beer. The dinner menu has run to grilled sea bass with sautéed potatoes and herb oil, brie and beetroot tart, crispy gnocchi with tomato, olives and spinach, and a local Stuart Grant rib-eye, followed by profiteroles or a salted-caramel tart. Breakfast can mean kippers, eggs Benedict or whisky porridge.

Hotel kitchens and town-centre dining

A few doors along the High Street, the Ben Mhor keeps a quieter lounge with no loud music, a real fire, a games room and Jake's Beer Garden. Its burgers are built from Balliefurth Butchers' meat in Ashers Bakery rolls, and Cairngorm Trade Winds and Stag pour from the cask. The ornate carved bar started life as an eighteenth-century dresser. The place had been shut for at least two years when it reopened in November 2015.

The Speyside Hotel, which reopened in early 2019 after standing closed for years, runs the Ghillie Bar and restaurant in its own gardens and keeps it open to non-residents. Chef Lucy has been in the kitchen five years, cooking Balliefurth featherblade with mash and Yorkshire pudding, Grants of Speyside lamb shank with barley, Buckie haddock and chips with what the menu calls Lucy's peas, Speyside haggis and black pudding in whisky sauce, Shetland mussels, and a vegan mushroom-and-thyme pie.

The Garth Hotel stands immediately above the Square, with a cocktail bar, a fireside snug and a large garden that looks down over it. Its 1769 Restaurant sources about nine in ten of its suppliers locally and grows some of its herbs in its own organic garden; sample dishes have included whisky-washed venison loin, pan-seared scallops, slow-braised Balliefurth ox cheek and Nethy Bridge pork. Dogs are welcome.

Pubs, food shops and independents

For a drink rather than a meal, the Claymore on the High Street is the plainest choice: darts, pool, sport on the television, a real fire, crisps and nuts and no kitchen. High Street Merchants, run by Allan and Eleanor Heaney, is the opposite kind of room — a café-bar with a wood stove and a courtyard that catches the sun, a changing seasonal menu and a name for carefully cooked fish; it has also served as the tap for the Two Thirsty Men brewery. Po Pia Thai, run by Callie and Bot, looks over the Square. The Wee Puffin, a small restaurant on the High Street, does a soup of the day and a haggis panini. The Pagoda café-bar occupies the town's Japanese-style Pagoda building and changes its food operators through the year.

The independent food shops are the reason to bring a cool bag. Ashers Bakery, at 6 High Street, is part of a firm that began in 1877; its morning rolls were named best in Scotland in 2019 and it was Scottish Baker of the Year in 2014. Out on the Woodlands Industrial Estate, KJ's Bothy Bakery bakes on site and pours Kiwi-style coffee — it was set up by Kirsten Gilmour, formerly of the Mountain Café — and runs a bicycle bread-delivery club and sells dog treats. Millers Supreme Meats & Deli, at 10 High Street, sells Scotch beef and lamb through local farmers. Grants of Speyside's factory shop carries its meat range, including a black pudding that holds two Great Taste stars. Grantown Dairy, associated in the town with Rosie, stocks seasonal fruit and vegetables, eggs, honey, preserves, bottled milk and wild-bird feed. Fiona's Wholefoods & Refills, in the YMCA building, does loose wholefoods, refills and vegan treats. Balliefurth Farm Shop sits on a 400-acre farm between here and Nethy Bridge, run by Abby and Patrick Harrison, beside the Spey and the Speyside Way; its meat turns up on the Ben Mhor and Garth menus.

Beyond food, the High Street holds a spread of independents that most towns this size lost years ago. The Bookmark is a small bookshop at number 34. Ewe & Me sells Sheila Fleet jewellery, Highland Stoneware and Ladycrow scarves. Mortimer's of Speyside has traded in fishing tackle for more than fifty years and will hire out equipment and help arrange a ghillie. Beale & Pyper, a house-furnishing business, dates from 1886. Spey Bank Studio combines a gallery, a pottery shop and teaching space.

Woods, river and Grantown's origins

The walking starts where the streets end. Anagach Woods cover close to a thousand acres of Scots pine, birch, juniper and rowan, with peat bogs, lochans and glacial eskers, and were first planted from 1766; some of the pines are around two hundred years old. Capercaillie live in them, which is why the signs ask you to keep dogs close and stay on the marked paths. The Speyside Way runs straight through, heading south through the woods towards Nethy Bridge and Castle Roy and north towards Cromdale, so a linear day-walk works in either direction. Shorter loops tie the river to the line of the old railway: a three-kilometre circuit of about three-quarters of an hour by the Spey, and a longer eleven-and-a-half-kilometre walk through the pinewood to the river and back. About a mile and a half south-east, the Old Spey Bridge — a three-span granite bridge of 1754, built for the military road and now closed to traffic — carries walkers and cyclists over the water. For a longer commitment, the Dava Way follows another lost railway thirty-eight kilometres north over Dava Moor to Forres, though nothing links its two ends by regular bus.

Sir James Grant laid the town out where military roads met, granting leases from 1765 under an advertisement offering "feus or long leases, and all proper encouragement to Manufacturers, Tradesmen, or others." The Gaelic name, Baile nan Granndach, means the town of the Grants, and Grantown came to call itself the capital of Strathspey. The Cross of Regality was moved from Old Grantown to the new Square a year after the founding. Several of Sir James's planned industries failed; what changed the town's fortunes was the railway, which arrived in 1863 and turned it towards visitors. Two stations once served Grantown; the line closed in 1965, and its track and bridges were lifted afterwards. Grantown Museum now occupies Burnfield House, built as the Grantown Female School on a bequest from Captain John Grant of Congash — £400 for the building and £400 towards the schoolmistress's salary — which opened in 1862 teaching reading, writing and sewing and closed in 1890. The museum bought it in 1995 and opened four years later; it is the driest way into all of this on a wet afternoon.

Connections and the music of place

The nearest railway station is Aviemore, about fifteen miles by road on the Perth–Inverness line, with Stagecoach buses linking the Square to it. The A95 brings you in from the A9 some ten miles off, and the A939 climbs south towards Tomintoul. Broomhill, four miles away, is the seasonal end of the heritage Strathspey Railway. On the edge of town at Craggan, the Cairn Distillery opened in 2022 with tours, a shop and food.

The musician Hamish Napier grew up in Grantown and has spent much of his career writing the place down: a five-part Strathspey suite that includes The River, The Railway and The Woods, the last of which was named Scots trad album of the year. He dedicated The Railway to James Telfer, the last signalman at Grantown East. The trains have not run since 1965.