Balmacara Square is a set of old farm steadings arranged around a millpond, in buildings that began as a stable, a tack room and a cart shed. The pond was recreated when the steading was renovated for homes and workshops, and the ground around it now serves as a picnic area. Parking is free, and the walking trails start more or less where you leave the car.
The café here is Cosy Corner, in the old steadings. Recent diners have ordered a ploughman's, a steak-and-blue-cheese baguette, soup, an all-day cooked breakfast and traybakes such as a salted-caramel-and-peanut-butter flapjack. A few doors along, Home in the Highlands fills Workshop 3 with clothing, kitchen and dining goods, children's gifts and home décor, stocking Scottish Oak, Scottish Linen, Tweedmill Textiles and Stockwell Ceramics. There is also a Steadings Gallery with a changing programme, though the National Trust for Scotland visitor centre that older guides mention has closed for good.
For the everyday things, the SPAR sits over on the A87 side of the village, at Reraig House. The Post Office it once housed closed in May 2024.
Balmacara's bar is at the Balmacara Hotel, down on the shore of Loch Alsh. Its Sea View Restaurant looks across the water toward Skye, and the kitchen leans on west-coast suppliers for seafood, meat and seasonal produce. The tables are positioned for both the Skye Bridge and, further along the coast, Eilean Donan.
Almost everything else here is walking. The Trust maintains seventeen miles of trails across the estate, from a short loop to a full day out. The waymarked Balmacara Woods and Reraig circuit is 5.25 kilometres, climbing the wooded slopes of Sgùrr Mòr for 236 metres of ascent before dropping steeply to Reraig and returning across open ground, with views out to Skye, the Cuillin and Kyle Rhea; a signed shortcut spares you the worst of the descent. The Lochalsh Woodland Walks are gentler and colour-coded, contouring above Loch Alsh past a rhododendron dell planted by E. H. M. Cox around 1960, a sunken garden, bamboo, fuchsias, hardy ferns and rare conifers added in the 1990s. Writing in The Guardian, Lucy Gillmore recommended you "meander the sheltered walks along the shores of Loch Alsh through the majestic Scots pine, oak and beech trees."
The Square grew from that late-eighteenth-century steading into an early-twentieth-century complex with cottages, a mill and the pond, and the wider estate came to the Trust in 1946 through Lady Margaret Hamilton's bequest, made in accordance with her late husband Sir Daniel's wishes. Older still is the crannog out in Loch Achaidh na h-Inich, dated to around three thousand years ago; it is one of roughly a hundred and twenty archaeological sites recorded across the ground. Up at Kirkton of Lochalsh, the parish church of 1804–06 is a tall harled kirk with round-headed windows, and its graveyard keeps a late-medieval slab incised with a sword and the initials "F M."
The A87 runs along the loch past the village, about three miles short of the Skye Bridge. Kyle of Lochalsh, terminus of the railway line up from Inverness, is a signed five-and-a-half-kilometre walk away, and Citylink buses stop at Kirkton, the hotel and Kyle if you would rather ride one leg.
Dogs are welcome across the estate, kept close around the crofts, and the Trust asks you to mind the honeybees it keeps on site. When there is a fixture, Kinlochshiel play their home shinty matches at Rearaig, just along the road.