Forsinard

From the Station to the Lookout

The visitor centre at Forsinard is the old railway station, stone-walled and slate-roofed, standing beside the level crossing. Trains still stop here — the hamlet is on the Far North Line between Inverness and Wick, and unlike several halts on that route it is not a request stop — but the building's job now is explaining the peat around it. Inside are displays about the blanket bog that spreads out around it, flat ground rising to hills on the skyline. It is not routinely staffed, and the displays are there to read at your own pace.

A short way from the door the boardwalk begins. The Dubh Lochains trail carries you a mile out across the bog, roughly forty-five minutes there and back, ending at the Flows Lookout, a tower raised over a pool system called the Dubh Lochan. From the top you can pick out Ben Griam Beg across the peatland. The optional return runs on older flagstones, which are wet and slippery and worth weighing up before you start them in the wrong shoes.

Life in the Blanket Bog

The bog is not the backdrop here; it is the reason to come. Peat has been gathering on this ground for about nine thousand years and reaches more than eight metres deep in places, its surface patterned with pools, hummocks and ridges. Carnivorous sundew and butterwort grow among them, alongside lizards, dragonflies and frogs. Golden plover, dunlin, greenshank, hen harrier, skylark and meadow pipit may be seen on the reserve; red-throated and black-throated divers keep to the remoter lochs and are a rarer sight. You are asked to stay on the trails, which are fragile, and to keep dogs on a short lead, especially between April and July when birds are nesting on the ground.

Professor Roxane Andersen, who studies peatland science at the University of the Highlands and Islands, has called the Flow Country "a functioning ecosystem, an extraordinary natural laboratory, and a stronghold for biodiversity."

Tearoom and Longer Trail

For food there is the Forsinard Lodge Tearoom, a mile north of the centre, which serves hot drinks, cakes and lunch. The lodge was built in the nineteenth century as a fishing and hunting lodge, tied to the Duke of Sutherland's sporting estates.

If you want a longer walk, the Forsinain Trail starts about four miles north on the A897 and runs four miles in total, two to three hours at an easy-to-moderate pace. It crosses farmland, open hill and old plantation ground, passes small lochs and dubh-lochains, and takes you through peatland being restored after forestry. Curlew, golden plover and dunlin feed on the farmland, and red-throated divers sometimes breed at the loch.

Restoration and the Journey In

The forestry is recent history. In the 1980s large areas of the Flow Country were drained, roaded and planted with commercial conifers. In January 1988 the Secretary of State for Scotland, Malcolm Rifkind, gave half the peatlands protection as SSSIs, and later that year the Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, ended the grants and tax breaks that had made otherwise unprofitable planting worthwhile. The RSPB bought the Forsinard estate in 1994, took out the trees and set about restoring the peat beneath. It is now the largest single area of land the RSPB manages anywhere in the UK. In 2024 the Flow Country became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first inscribed anywhere specifically for its peatlands; King Charles III came to Forsinard afterwards to unveil a plaque.

Getting here takes some doing. The A897 is single-track with passing places, running down to Helmsdale in the south and up to Melvich in the north; Thurso is twenty-nine miles off and Inverness ninety-four. There is no scheduled bus or taxi, though a pre-booked Dial-a-Bus may serve Forsinard and connect with trains, subject to demand and booking.

Iron Church and Peat by Rail

Eight miles north at Craigtown stands Halladale Parish Church, a corrugated-iron church and manse from 1910, probably built by Speirs of Glasgow and brought north by rail. Peat once went the other way on that line, carried out from Forsinard to distilleries around Scotland. Swallows often nest in the tower.