The public bar of the Lairg Highland Hotel is still called the Nip Inn, which was the name the whole place had in 1996, when it was a five-bedroom pub with a small open-plan dining room. Allan and Annette Hamilton opened it that April with a six-month-old son, also called Allan. It has since grown into a ten-bedroom hotel with a bistro and two bars, and the old name has stayed on the door of the adults-only one. The kitchen cooks to order, working from Scotch beef and lamb bought through local butchers and fish, game and cheese sourced nearby, and the bar keeps a shelf of Scottish single malts and gins. Well-behaved dogs are welcome on leads in the bar outside food-service times, though never in the bistro.
Down at the water, The Pier has been serving since 2010, its windows facing the length of Loch Shin. It does brunch, lunch and weekend dinner, cocktails, coffee and its own cake, and is child-friendly, dog-friendly and wheelchair-accessible. The dinner menu changes with the seasons, but one past version ran to seared scallops with butternut-squash purée and hazelnuts, venison haunch steak with pulled shoulder, beer-battered Scrabster haddock, and a Highland hotdog built from Robert Grant beef sausage, Cockburn's haggis and cheddar.
For self-catering, the SPAR at Lochside handles the basics and doubles as the Post Office and off-licence, with hot food and a barista coffee counter. It is a working village shop rather than a destination, which is what you want when you have run out of milk.
Ferrycroft, the visitor centre across Black Bridge, is free to go into. Its three rooms explain the loch and the hydro scheme, the forestry and the land, and the people who have lived here; there is a children's corner, a coffee stop selling traybakes, shortbread and ice cream, and a play area with swings, a climbing frame and a zip wire.
The trails start from here. The Lochside Trail is a flat mile on firm gravel through Ferry Wood pines, past dipping ponds busy with dragonflies in summer to a viewpoint over Little Loch Shin; a pushchair manages it easily. The Broch Trail carries that on to the remains of a broch some two thousand years old, in sight of the Shin dam. The Ord Hill Trail is the hard one — under two miles but steep, muddy and rough underfoot, threading between hut circles, burial cairns and a chambered cairn to high views of Loch Shin and Ben Klibreck.
Ord Hill holds the traces of a farming community from around three thousand years ago: houses, fields, cairns and burnt mounds you can read straight off the hillside. Lower down, the burial ground has two memorials worth the walk. The 1880 Matheson Memorial, a blue-grey marble loggia with six Corinthian columns and a domed canopy, was raised for Sir James Matheson, a founder of Jardine Matheson; its carved poppy-heads acknowledge the Far Eastern opium trade the firm was built on. Nearby, the Mackay Memorial of about 1803 commemorates William Mackay, whose 1795 account of the shipwreck of the Juno was later largely absorbed into Byron's Don Juan.
Lairg has long been a crossroads. The A836 runs through it and the A839 heads west over Black Bridge; the station, opened in April 1868, still sits about two miles out on the Far North Line, where trains from Inverness are usually met by a local bus. Buses stop at Black Bridge too, though it is worth checking Traveline Scotland before you rely on one.
Lairg was long best known for its lamb sale, once the largest one-day sheep sale in Europe, when around thirty-five thousand lambs might change hands in a day; by 2014 the figure had fallen below fifteen thousand. "But we've kept faith with sheep over a significant period of time, including some lean years," Sir John Nutting of the Auchentoul estate said that year.
Four miles south, the Falls of Shin give you salmon throwing themselves up the rocks in season. But you do not have to go that far for water. From the picnic benches on the Lochside Trail, on a still afternoon, the pines come down to Little Loch Shin and the dragonflies do most of the moving.