Cawdor

Castle Legend and Conservation Village

Under the old tower of Cawdor Castle, in a stone vault at ground level, stands the trunk of a dead tree. Radiocarbon dating puts the wood at around 1372, and closer study has identified it as holly, correcting the older story that it was hawthorn. The castle's founding legend has a thane load a donkey with gold and follow it until it lay down to rest; the place it chose was here, and the tower was raised around the tree.

Cawdor's historic core has been a conservation area since 1973: a church, a green and a pub, with lanes that run out quickly into farmed Strathnairn to the north and heather moor to the south. The village sits just below the castle and its parkland, on the B9090 about five miles south-west of Nairn and thirteen north-east of Inverness.

Tavern and Castle Courtyard

The Cawdor Tavern is the only pub, with a separate bar and restaurant, a real fire, a pool table and darts, and a beer garden. Dogs are welcome. The three regular cask beers come from Cromarty Brewing up towards the coast: Happy Chappy, a golden session ale, Raptor IPA, and an 80/- Scotch Ale, with a fourth that changes. The kitchen leans Scottish and has sent out scallops, venison, haggis bonbons and sticky toffee pudding. The entrance and the interior are level, and there is an accessible toilet.

For daytime food there is the Courtyard Café, in the castle's former factor's house, with tables out under the wall of the Flower Garden. It is part of the paid attraction rather than a walk-in village café, so you need garden or castle admission to reach it. Scones, soup and cakes are homemade, alongside cakes from KJ's Bothy Bakery and vegan baking from Pure Highland in Nairn, and the kitchen uses Cawdor Estate beef and wild game and a pressed juice made from more than sixty apple varieties grown in the grounds. A haggis-and-cheddar panini and a Cawdor Estate beef burger have both featured on the menu.

Burn Paths, Woods and Gardens

The Cawdor Burn circular starts in Cawdor village and covers 3.5 km in up to an hour, with only 8 m of ascent. Easy woodland paths follow the burn to its confluence with the River Nairn, then pass Milton Bridge without crossing it before returning through fields; one short stretch of road has no pavement. Inside the castle grounds, the Big Wood has marked trails from three-quarters of a mile to five, threading old sessile oak, birch and juniper, with the High Bridge carried more than a hundred and thirty feet over the Rereach Burn as the reward on the longer loop. There is a signed dog loop of about a kilometre. The walking advice is simple: "All burns lead to the Castle."

The gardens repay an afternoon — a Flower Garden laid out around 1710, a walled garden given over to a maze of more than twelve hundred hollies, and a wild garden of Tibetan plants set out in the 1960s by the fifth Earl.

The Parish Church

Cawdor Parish Church dates from 1619, crow-stepped and galleried inside, with a square tower and a weathercock. In its walled burial ground, at the junction of the paths, an early-nineteenth-century wrought-iron lantern still stands where someone once needed a light to find the gate.