Inverdruie

The Farm Shop and Barn Café

At the Rothiemurchus Farm Shop, Brian and Fraser butcher Highland beef and venison on the premises, hanging the beef for at least twenty-one days before it reaches the counter. The estate's venison was good enough for Rick Stein to choose for the BBC's Food Heroes. Alongside the meat there is homemade haggis and black pudding, home-cured bacon, pies, pâtés, sausage rolls, quiches, seasonal rainbow trout, heather honey and a counter of artisan cheeses. This is the centre of Inverdruie: a farm shop, a café and the gateway to the forest, two miles from Aviemore.

Opposite the shop is the Barn Café, formerly the Druie Café, with a wood-burning stove and a room that looks out over the River Druie. The kitchen does breakfast rolls and pastries in the morning, then a soup of the day, one-pot specials and Cullen skink served with a homemade cheese scone. The coffee comes from the Perth Bean Shop.

At the Forest Threshold

Inverdruie is less a village than a threshold. Behind it lies Rothiemurchus: roughly thirty square kilometres of forest with more than ten million trees, Scots pines that average over a century and a handful that have stood for more than three hundred years. The River Spey marks the western edge, and the Druie and other burns run down out of the Cairngorms through the woods. The old Gaelic name for the range is Am Monadh Ruadh, the russet mountains.

The walking starts at the door. The Beaver Trail is a seven-kilometre loop through ancient forest and beaver wetland past Lochan Mor, and if you turn back at the lochan you have a flat two miles that most people can manage. The longer walk is to Loch an Eilein, either the full circuit from the Farm Shop or a three-mile ring from the loch's own car park, through pinewood to a view of the island castle. The Old Logging Way climbs gently to Glenmore and the beach at Loch Morlich, and doubles as a traffic-free path back to Aviemore. Keep dogs close: this is capercaillie and red squirrel country, and the paths are routed to leave the wildlife alone.

Castle and Kirk

A tower house is attributed to Alexander Stewart, the Wolf of Badenoch, in the late fourteenth century, though its earlier history is uncertain. In 1690 Jacobite survivors of Cromdale attacked it while it held mostly the women, children and older people of Rothiemurchus, and one account has the laird's wife, Grizel Mor — Big Grace — casting musket balls and shouting abuse from the walls. In the 1700s a dam raised the water to float timber down to the Spey, drowning the causeway that once linked the island to the shore. Victorian egg collectors are said to have swum out to the osprey nests on the battlements. The castle later stood in for the island graveyard in the first series of Monarch of the Glen.

The old parish church sits nearby, built in 1830 on the site of an earlier one and now roofless, its four-bay front and pedimented bellcote open to the sky. The Grant enclosure lies in the burial ground; the family has held Rothiemurchus since the sixteenth century.

Aviemore Connections

Aviemore, about five minutes by road or a walk along the Logging Way, has the Old Bridge Inn, which stands on the Spey in a former gamekeeper's cottage. The evening menu runs to smoked haddock and sweetcorn chowder, a Caribbean lamb curry pie, spinach-and-basil risotto and the OBI beef burger, and dogs are welcome in the lounge. Aviemore is also the nearest station, about two miles away, with trains to Inverness and south to Edinburgh and Glasgow; Stagecoach's service 30 runs from there past the Rothiemurchus car park to Glenmore and the ski centre.

Estate Adventures

Back at the farm shop, the estate runs pony trekking, falconry, archery and rafting, and for smaller visitors there is calf bottle-feeding and deer feeding.