Kinlochleven

Water, Walkers and the Tailrace

The pipes give it away before anything else does. Six steel penstocks run straight down the mountainside above Kinlochleven, feeding the hydro powerhouse at the bottom of the slope, and they are plainly visible above the village. Water is the organising fact here. The River Leven meets the head of the sea-loch Loch Leven, waterfalls come off the surrounding tops, and a reservoir and aqueduct sit high in the hills, sending water down those pipes to the turbines.

The West Highland Way emerges opposite the Tailrace Inn. Anyone arriving from the south has just come down the Devil's Staircase from Kingshouse, a descent Paul Saunders called "nothing short of a knee-wobbler." The six-bedroom inn serves home-cooked food: Cullen skink, a venison-and-haggis burger, venison pie, mince and tatties, battered fish and chips.

Village Tables and Arrival

A short walk away, Highland Getaway runs as a café and bar by day and a restaurant at night, with a balcony that passing walkers rate for a pint. On the north-east edge, looking out over Loch Leven, the MacDonald Hotel keeps the Bothy Bar and the Purple Stag Restaurant; the loch view is the reason to sit there, and it is worth booking ahead. For something quicker there is Rice & Chips, which does both Chinese takeaway and fish and chips, and the Co-op on Leven Road is the final major resupply point for anyone carrying on to Fort William.

The village sits on the B863, the only road around Loch Leven, reached from the A82 via Glencoe or North Ballachulish. The nearest railway is at Fort William, about twenty-one miles off, with Shiel Buses running the route between the two.

Mountain Walks and Adventure

The walking is the main event. The Grey Mare's Tail path climbs steeply to a waterfall where the Allt Coire nam Ba drops almost fifty metres in a single fall, then opens out to views down Loch Leven to the Pap of Glencoe. The longer Blackwater Reservoir circuit runs eleven miles past the wooded River Leven to a dam that was, when it was built, the longest mass-concrete gravity dam in Europe. Walkhighlands describes that glen as "once industrially exploited but today very beautiful and peaceful." The route passes the foundations of a First World War prisoner-of-war camp and a cemetery for the navvies who died building the dam, many of them, it is said, on the return over the Devil's Staircase after drinking at Kingshouse.

For something steeper, Vertical Descents runs via ferrata, canyoning, gorge scrambling, tubing and rafting from the village. The Leven Centre has a gym, a games hall, a floodlit astroturf pitch and a theatre and cinema space.

The Electric Village and Its Churches

The place exists because of aluminium. The North British Aluminium Company built the reservoir, the hydro plant and the smelter early in the twentieth century; the works employed over 800 people at times, and the scheme wired every house for power, which the Kinlochleven Community Trust credits with earning the village the name the Electric Village. The smelter closed in June 2000. Before any of it, this was two hamlets, Kinlochmore and Kinlochbeag, and a stop on the cattle-droving routes.

Kinlochleven Parish Church, finished in 1930 to J. Jeffrey Waddell's design, has stained glass of St Andrew and St George in its south nave.

Seafood Along Loch Leven

Five miles out on the B863, the Lochleven Seafood Café keeps its shellfish in tanks fed with sea-loch water — oysters, razor clams, scallops, lobster, crab — and sets its tables on a terrace with a view across Loch Leven to the Pap of Glencoe.