The mission church in Insh is long, low and white-harled, with a ship's bell hanging in its west bellcote and a Celtic-cross window made as a mosaic by local schoolchildren. It went up after 1843, when part of the congregation walked out of the parish and began holding their own services in the village. The war memorial stands in the grounds. The original tin roof has since been tiled.
The village sits above the eastern edge of Insh Marshes, a floodplain of the River Spey that the RSPB manages as a reserve of roughly ten square kilometres between Kingussie and Kincraig. Pools, marsh and woodland give way to rolling hills, and in spring the wet grassland fills with breeding waders: curlews, lapwings, redshanks and snipe. Cattle, sheep and ponies graze it lightly to keep it open. Insh's visitor life happens out here rather than in any village centre, because there isn't much of one.
You reach the reserve from a car park off the B970, with twelve spaces, a couple of Blue Badge bays and a picnic bench, but no toilets. Three trails cross soft, uneven ground; from April to mid-August, when birds are nesting, dogs go on a short lead. The Invertromie trail runs about four and a half kilometres and takes a couple of hours, past hides at Gordonhall, Lookout and Invertromie and across Tromiebridge meadow, where 150 plant species have been counted. For a longer day, a seven-and-a-half-mile loop links Feshiebridge, the Uath Lochans and the old Scots pines down to Loch Insh.
For food and a pint you go to nearby Kincraig. The Old Post Office is a café and gallery run by the Vastano family: Toni cooks, having come from restaurant kitchens, and Ann Vastano paints Highland landscapes, some of which end up on the labels of the Cairngorm Brewery ales sold at the counter. The kitchen turns out focaccia and bagel sandwiches, homemade soups, scones and traybakes, and doughnuts with a pot of Nutella to dip them in. The daily specials lean Mediterranean.
The Suie Bar is the proper local, a Victorian lodge with a wooden floor, a wood-burning stove, a pool table and a jukebox, and traditional music on regularly. Cairngorm Trade Winds is the fixture at the pump, with guests from Orkney and elsewhere changing beside it. The lodge has had two owners in 108 years. Dogs are welcome and there is a garden.
Down at the loch, the Boathouse's menu lists oak-smoked salmon with horseradish egg mayonnaise and rye bread, ribeye with parmesan-and-truffle fries, salmon-and-dill fishcakes, a pork, 'nduja and caraway ragù, and Sunday roasts that run from pork belly and beef striploin to a nut roast. It shares a site with the Loch Insh Outdoor Centre, where you can hire a bike, take out a pedalo or kayak, try archery, and in winter curl or ski.
Getting here means the B970, which threads through the village. A usual approach leaves the A9 at Kingussie, four or five miles off, where the nearest station sits on the Highland Main Line between Inverness and the south. Kingussie also puts you within reach of the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig, with its wolves, bison and snow leopards, and the open-air Highland Folk Museum at Newtonmore, which reconstructs more than thirty-five buildings of Highland life.
The old parish kirk stands apart from all this, on a wooded rise above Loch Insh called Tom Eunan, Adamnan's Mount, after the abbot who wrote the life of Columba and died in 704. The present white kirk went up in 1792, though worship on the spot is held to reach back to the sixth century. It keeps an early copper handbell and a stone basin thought to have served as the first church's font, and the storyteller Hamish Napier ties the loch and its bell to the Irish legend of the swan children of Lir. He calls this stretch of water some of the most beautiful spots in Badenoch, and from the churchyard, with the marshes spread out below, it is not a hard case to make.