Strathyre

Café stop and village-made ice cream

The Broch Café sits on Main Street where the A84 and National Cycle Route 7 run together, which means most people who stop in Strathyre stop here first. Lesley and Bill took it over in 2015, and in 2021 it was named the best café or bistro in Scotland at the Food Awards Scotland. The toasties are the fixed point of the menu — BLT, tuna and mayonnaise, cheese and pickle, cheese and tomato, ham with cheddar or tomato — made with meat from Comrie Butchers and free-range eggs, with Italian Lucaffé coffee to follow. The kitchen has Coeliac UK training, and celebration cakes come out of the same premises under the name Broch Bakers.

Ice cream is a local industry. Airlie Ice Cream was founded in the village in 2017 by Colin Adams and now turns out dairy vanilla, raspberry ripple with a handmade sauce, mint choc chip, and Scottish tablet made to a secret family recipe. The brand's mascot is an otter. "We've spent many an entertaining hour watching otters play," Adams has said, explaining that the animals were spotted on the River Balvag just west of the road.

The glen and River Balvag

That river does most of the work of shaping the place. Strathyre is a single line of low, repeatedly gabled houses along the east side of the A84, held inside a forested glen where the slopes rise steeply on both sides. The Balvag meanders through woodland to the west, connecting Loch Voil to the north with Loch Lubnaig immediately south. The village looks small because everything around it is large.

The walking starts from the door. The Strathyre Circuit is a three-kilometre loop of about an hour, climbing 140 metres on forest tracks past the war memorial, the recreation ground and the pinewoods along Tighanes Burn, with a fair chance of red squirrels, deer and birds of prey. At the forestry car park there is a reconstructed cross-section of an Iron Age broch, built to show how the fortified house once sheltered both people and their livestock. For something longer, Beinn an t-Sìdhean climbs 493 metres over four and a half miles to views south down Loch Lubnaig towards Ben Vorlich and Stùc a' Chròin. On wheels, the signed Rob Roy Loop runs twelve and a half kilometres to Balquhidder and back, passing Loch Voil, Ben Ledi and Rob Roy MacGregor's grave; one stretch of road gets busy in summer and needs care.

Walking, cycling and family stops

Closer to the centre there is a small play park and a tennis court beside the recreation ground, which makes the flat riverside end of the village easy going with children.

Drove road, railway and Gaelic poet

Strathyre grew up on a drove road north into the Highlands, then rearranged itself when the Callander and Oban Railway arrived in 1870 and pulled development across the river to form the present Main Street. The old line is now the cycle path. The village also produced Dugald Buchanan, born at Ardoch Mill in 1716, who became one of the foremost Gaelic poets of his century and helped translate the New Testament into Gaelic. His Gothic monument, put up by public subscription in 1883, stands beside the road with clustered red-marble columns and four niches carrying Gaelic and English panels; its former fountain bowls have long since been filled in.

Arrival and remembrance

Stirling station is just under twenty miles off, so most people arrive along the A84, which doubles as the C60 bus route between Killin and Callander. Behind the former church, on a small wooded rise, a stone cairn remembers the local men of both world wars — easy to miss, and worth the short climb up to it.