Bonar Bridge

Three Bridges and a Changing Route

At the village end of the bridge, a cairn carries stone and metal plaques charting the three crossings that have spanned the Kyle of Sutherland here. The first was Thomas Telford's, its cast-iron span assembled and tested in Denbighshire before being carried north and opened in 1812. A flood swept it away on 29 January 1892; the replacement opened the following year, and the present bridge dates from 1973. Before any of them the settlement was simply Bonar, a ford across the tidal water. The bridge gave it the rest of its name.

You are standing on the north bank, where the Dornoch Firth narrows into the Kyle and the rivers Oykel, Cassley, Shin and Carron feed the water above the bridge. Wooded slopes rise on either side, and the hills climb away beyond Ardgay across the river. It is a quieter place than it once was. When the Dornoch Firth Bridge diverted the A9 in the 1980s, it cut more than twenty miles from the east-coast run and took the through-traffic with it.

Food, Drink and Provisions

The Dunroamin Hotel on Lairg Road is the place to eat and drink. It has a restaurant, a bar, a lounge and a garden, and guests tend to single out the home-cooked food and the proprietors. Venison pie and roast venison appear on the table, and breakfast has included scrambled eggs with home-smoked trout. One cyclist passing through noted the bike storage, the bar and the food in the same breath.

For provisions, the SPAR at Kyle Bakery on Dornoch Road covers the essentials and a good deal more: an ATM, fresh fruit and vegetables, fresh meat, an in-store bakery and coffee. Ardgay Game works the other end of the supply chain, processing red, sika and roe deer from the surrounding estates at its site here.

Walks Through Wood and Moor

The walking is the reason to stay. A firm, mostly grassy track runs two miles to the shore of Loch Migdale, passing through pinewood where Canadian foresters lived and worked during the Second World War. Honest George's Circuit, a two-and-a-half-mile loop, follows the story of George Dempster, the reforming landlord and tree enthusiast who lived from 1732 to 1818. Longer legs climb to A'Chraisg, where a steep kilometre above Loch Migdale opens onto a wide panorama, and where two benches shaped from the landscape were made by the Ardgay craftsman Bill Ross. Closer to the village, Balblair Forest gives an easy hour or so a mile to the west.

The wider Ledmore and Migdale reserve covers almost seven hundred hectares of oakwood, pinewood and bog, three of them Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Pine martens, otters and three species of deer are seen along its paths, and red squirrels were brought back in 2019.

Salmon, Community and Local History

A short drive up the A836 reaches the Falls of Shin, where wild Atlantic salmon can be seen throwing themselves at the water in summer, watched from a viewpoint above short waymarked forest trails. Between Bonar Bridge and Ardgay, the Kyle of Sutherland Hub runs a soft-play area, a fitness suite and a café. It began in an old double-decker bus and two temporary classrooms and is now a charity managed by volunteers.

History surfaces where you least expect it. In 1900 workmen blasting a granite knoll near Loch Migdale uncovered the Migdale Hoard, an Early Bronze Age set of bronze axehead, bangles, anklets and carved jet. Creich Parish Church, built between 1911 and 1913 by Alexander Maitland and Sons of Tain, keeps its original pulpit, cast-iron arcades and stained glass by Percy Bacon and by Roland Milton of Glasgow; Andrew Carnegie of Skibo was its principal heritor.

Arriving by Rail

The nearest train is at Ardgay, an unstaffed station across the Kyle with a small free car park and stands for six bicycles. From the platform, if the tide is out, you can watch the water pull back off the mud and the birds work the edge of the firth.