Kincraig

The Old Post Office and a Dispersed Village

The village shop and post office traded for a hundred and twenty years before it closed in July 2016. Three years later it reopened as the Old Post Office Café & Gallery, run by the Vastano family: Toni cooks, Ann paints the Highland landscapes that hang on the walls, and the two occupations share the room. You can order homemade focaccia and bagel sandwiches, a daily soup, scones and traybakes, or fresh doughnuts served with a pot of Nutella to dip them in. The specials lean Mediterranean. Alongside the food the shelves carry local art and crafts and bottles of Cairngorm Brewery ale whose labels Ann painted.

Kincraig sits on the west bank of the Spey at the northern end of Loch Insh, on the western edge of the Cairngorms. It is a dispersed sort of place rather than a tight stone core — Victorian cottages and villas, a run of 1930s terraces, later detached houses spread along the road, with forest, loch and heather moor filling the gaps and the mountains behind.

Loch Insh and the Suie Bar

The Loch Insh Outdoor Centre runs paddleboards, kayaks, canoes, rowing boats, sailing dinghies, windsurfers and pedalos from April to October, and offers archery, bike hire, curling, tubing, skiing and snowboarding year-round. Its Boathouse Restaurant and Quarter Deck Bar look straight out over the loch to the forest and hills. The kitchen sends out Scottish oak-smoked salmon, salmon and dill fishcakes, pork-and-nduja rigatoni, a seven-spice chicken burger and roast courgette and lemon gnocchi, with Sunday roasts of pork belly, beef strip loin or nut roast. There is a rotating Cairngorm ale on draught and bottled Wildcat, Trade Winds and IPA to go with it.

The Suie Bar is the village's other drinking place, and a plainer one: a wooden floor, a wood-burning stove, a pool table, a jukebox, a dartboard, and traditional Scottish music played often. Three handpumps pour Cairngorm Trade Winds as the regular, something from Orkney and a further guest. Dogs are welcome and there is a garden. Walkers, skiers and cyclists use it as readily as locals do. The six-bedroom Suidhe Lodge next door, once the hotel the bar belonged to, now lets as self-catering.

The Old Kirk and Its Bell

Above the loch, on a wooded rise called Tom Eunan — Adamnan's Mount — stands the white-harled Old Kirk, built in the later eighteenth century. Inside, set in a wall alcove, are an early copper bell and communion plate, and a plaque to the Macpherson Grants from 1817. The bell is the strange one: it may be a thousand years old, and the stories attached to it hold that it healed the sick, flew home over the Drumochter pass after being stolen, and once called swans down to worship.

From Boat of Insh to Kincraig

Kincraig was formerly Boat of Insh. A ferry carried people across the Spey east of the village, and the railway arrived in 1863; the station was renamed Kincraig in 1871, apparently around the time a bridge replaced the ferry, and the village took its name from the station in turn. The station closed in 1965, though the Perth to Inverness line still runs through; the surviving Boat of Insh bridge, an eight-span wooden plate-girder crossing on rubble piers, is still there. Aviemore, a few miles north on the old A9, has the nearest trains, with Kingussie to the south.

Wildlife and the Speyside Way

Two miles down the road the Highland Wildlife Park keeps polar bears, red pandas and wolverines across its 105 hectares, which is the sort of outing that fills a day. But the closer pleasure is the walking. The Speyside Way runs north to Aviemore in about 2.5 hours and south past the Insh Marshes, where curlew, lapwing, redshank and snipe breed on the wet floodplain.