On Main Street, Ardgay Stores does the things a village shop does—bread, milk, newspapers, hot rolls and sandwiches made on the spot, homemade cakes—and holds a licence besides. Holly and Adam Wardrop took it on in 2014, and the café runs alongside the shop.
The village sits at the mouth of Strathcarron, where the River Carron comes down to the Kyle of Sutherland. The Kyle is the tidal estuary for five rivers at once—the Carron, Oykel, Cassley, Shin and Evelix. From here the ground climbs quickly into wooded crags and long inland straths.
The Gillies family runs The Hirsel, a small farm on a patchwork of bog, ancient woodland, rough grazing and meadow. Donald and Donna Gillies keep heritage-breed Hebridean sheep for mutton and wool, free-range Scots Dumpy chickens, bees, and three Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs called Basil, Ginger and Saffron. The farm was Highly Commended in the Rare Breeds Survival Trust's 2022 Scottish sustainable food awards. Ardgay Game has been processing and exporting Scottish wild venison and game from the surrounding estates for more than forty years.
The old parish church stands above its burial ground as the Kincardine Church, built in 1799 and now home to the Kyle of Sutherland Heritage Society. Its predecessor, thatched with heather, burned down in the late 1790s after the beadle fired a musket at starlings nesting in the roof; the fire took the parish records with it. The minister, Andrew Gallie, rebuilt on the same ground, and his initials sit above the door. Inside is the Kincardine Stone, a coffin-shaped Pictish gravemarker carved with David wrenching open a lion's jaws, the rescued lamb and a harp—the most northerly of its kind, and the only one to carry scriptural imagery on a monument of this type. Viewing is by arrangement with the society. Outside the door stands a second, much older stone, the Ardjachie Stone, found at Meikle Ferry in 1960 and marked with some thirty cupmarks and spoked-wheel and inverted-L symbols.
Down by the square, a boulder called the Clach Eiteag records the Feill Eiteachan, a cattle and produce fair held here by the eighteenth century. The stone was moved between parishes to mark wherever the fair was being held that year.
For walking, the Falls of Shin lie a few miles north, with short woodland trails through larch, fir and pine and a viewpoint over the falls, where Atlantic salmon can be seen leaping upriver. A circuit crosses the Kyle near Invershin for the woods around Carbisdale, where View Rock looks back over the water and the 1650 battlefield of Montrose's last fight lies along the route. The castle itself is a private home, best not approached, and a closed footbridge currently rules out completing the upper loop. The golf club west of the village is a nine-hole course laid out in 1904 on an old market stance above Loch Migdale, purple heather and Scots pine among the fairways; Peter Alliss called it "mini-Gleneagles."
Ardgay has its own station on the Far North line, just off the A836, with two platforms and a twelve-space car park but no staff and nowhere to buy a cup of tea. The Rapsons service 4 stops by the Post Office on its way between Lairg and Tain. Between the village and Bonar Bridge, the Kyle of Sutherland Hub runs soft play, a café and a fitness suite. It began life on an old double-decker bus and in two temporary classrooms, and grew from there.