Kirkhill

The Inn and the Village Hub

The Old North Inn stands at Inchmore, where the B9164 into Kirkhill meets the A862, and it has been there in one form or another since 1720. Its bar is called the Bogroy Bar. It is the only pub in the immediate Kirkhill and Inchmore area, and one of the older inns in Scotland by its own reckoning.

Kirkhill itself has no permanent shop and no standing café. What it has is the community centre, which runs a café and a monthly market, keeps a small lending library, and holds a Post Office twice a week. For a proper supermarket you go to Beauly or into Inverness, about seven miles east along the A862. The centre is also where the village gathers indoors: a sports hall and grass pitches, a floodlit all-weather pitch used for football, tennis and shinty, and a weekly run of tots' groups, Scouts, indoor bowling, Scottish country dancing, Pilates and karate. A playpark and the Millennium Garden sit beside it.

The Aird and Reelig Glen

The village lies in the Aird, the old Fraser lands on the south side of the Beauly Firth. The name is Gaelic for high place, and the ground bears it out: the walking routes cross farmland and crofting country into woodland and long views.

The best of these is at Reelig Glen, nearby, where some of the tallest trees in Britain grow along the Moniack Burn. The Tall Trees Trail is a mile-long loop of about forty-five minutes through moss and firs, past a nineteenth-century stone bridge and a grotto, with steep slopes, roots and mud to reckon with. Sandra Reid of Forestry and Land Scotland calls it "a magical woodland which is very popular." There is parking and a picnic area, though the nearest toilets are back in Beauly. If you want more underfoot, the Upper Reelig Trail is steeper and longer, and the Newtonhill Circuit runs about four miles over farmland, Scots pine and mature beech, with views reaching Ben Wyvis, the Moray Firth and the Fannich and Affric ranges. The back roads it uses have no footways, so walk them with care.

The Old Fox and Wardlaw

The walk most people come for goes to the Wardlaw Mausoleum, roughly three miles there and back from the inn, with the option of pushing on towards Ferry Brae. This is the Lovat burial aisle, built in 1634 and remodelled in 1722 by Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat — the Old Fox, executed for treason in 1747. The balustrade carries the Lovat arms, and inside a pedimented memorial to Thomas Lord Fraser was put up by his son Simon. A trapdoor opens onto a vault of lead coffins. Tradition held that the Old Fox's body was smuggled home from London and laid here, but when the supposed remains were examined they turned out to belong to an unidentified young woman. Where he actually lies is still unsettled. A charitable trust now cares for the building and gives talks; opening arrangements shift, so it is worth checking before you set off.

Down in the village, Wardlaw Parish Church dates from 1790, a symmetrical six-bay front of tall round-headed windows with a six-column bellcote holding a single surviving bell. Some of the original intersecting glazing remains in the gallery windows, and the interior keeps a west gallery and a raised minister's desk.

Cottage, Connections and Priory

Elsewhere there is Groam Cottage, a rare cruck-framed dwelling from the later eighteenth century, where the MacDonalds who lived there were said to have hidden two Jacobites in the rafters after Culloden.

The nearest railway station is at Beauly, a single step-free platform with free parking and a waiting room but no ticket machine, staff or toilets. Buses run from the village too: the Stagecoach 28/28A goes to Inverness, Beauly, Muir of Ord and Dingwall, and the D&E Coaches 307/307A calls at Inverness, with some journeys continuing to Beauly and Hughton, though timetables shift with the school term. Beauly is worth the short hop in its own right for the free ruins of its priory, whose abbey church keeps some fine funerary monuments.

A Message from the Ground

A seventeenth-century gold ring was once turned up in the ground here, inscribed "Grace mee, with acceptance." It sits now in the museum at Inverness, a small private message that outlasted whoever meant it.