At Aran Bakery on Atholl Street the queue forms early, which for a town of this size tells you something. It is run by Flora Shedden, who reached the tents of the 2015 Great British Bake Off and came home to sell bread, cakes and patisserie instead. Her sister shop, LÒN, sits on the High Street doing free-range eggs, Scottish cut flowers and whatever fruit and veg came in that morning.
Dunkeld takes its food seriously for a place you can walk across in ten minutes. There is a grocer selling smoked salmon, Arbroath Smokies and Loch Tay Fudge, and a deli with a cheese counter that doubles as a wine bar and won Best Scottish Independent Retailer at the 2018 Great British Food Awards. The Ell Shop, named after an old cloth measure, handles the souvenirs.
You arrive across Thomas Telford's bridge, seven arches of stone thrown over the Tay in 1809. The ruined cathedral stands among mature trees on the north bank, and the whitewashed Little Houses cluster around the Cross. Those cottages were nearly lost. In 1950 the National Trust for Scotland launched an appeal to save them, and over fifteen years restored the harled 18th-century houses given by the Duke of Atholl. The result is one of the most complete 18th-century townscapes in Scotland.
The Taybank is the pub most people mean when they say the pub. It cooks wood-fired pizzas eaten on the riverbank and runs a seasonal menu of game, foraged chanterelles and wild garlic, and produce from its own walled garden. The beer garden, right on the Tay, is billed as "one of Scotland's largest." Thursday nights bring traditional Scottish music sessions, and the year fills out with bluegrass, ceilidh dancing, open-air cinema and pub quizzes.
The Perth Arms is the older option, first opened in 1795 and run by the same family for close to fifty years. Two handpulls, generally Scottish beers, and a secluded garden round the back. The Atholl Arms, a B-listed corner building from 1833, keeps a small bar with a view over the river and a bistro serving venison sirloin and steak pie. Dogs arriving get treats, a water bowl and a doggie towel.
The walking starts more or less at the door. West of the A9, the Hermitage path follows the Braan through Craigvinean Forest to Ossian's Hall, a Victorian platform hung over a waterfall where salmon leap in season. Across the Tay, the Birnam riverside path passes the Birnam Oak, roughly 600 years old and said to be the last survivor of Shakespeare's Birnam Wood. Further out, the Loch of the Lowes reserve keeps hides for the ospreys that visit April to August, with red squirrels and pine marten for company.
There was a monastery here from the 6th century, and in 849 Kenneth MacAlpin moved the relics of St Columba up from Iona to keep them from the Vikings. The Battle of Dunkeld in 1689 destroyed most of the town, which is partly why the rebuilt version is so uniformly 18th-century.
Niel Gow, Scotland's most celebrated fiddler, lived fifty years in a broom-thatched cottage at Inver across the Tay, weaving linen by hand between tunes.