Lochcarron Weavers keeps more than five hundred tartans in its Strome range, sold from a shop in a village strung along the north shore of a sea loch. The first Strome tartan, the Crawford, was woven here in 1949 on a Hattersley Domestic loom. Commercial weaving has since gone — the company moved to Selkirk around 2006 — but the shop stayed, and the heritage side of it settled into new premises in the village in 2023.
The village is long and thin, most of it facing the water. Behind it rise the Strathcarron hills; across the loch sits Attadale's greener strath, backed by wild ground, and the road west runs through crofts and woodland toward North Strome. The Applecross peninsula and Torridon fill in the wider view.
Main Street holds most of what you'll want day to day. The Lochcarron Food Centre is a SPAR with a deli, post office, fuel and a hardware counter, and it will deliver groceries to a holiday home before you arrive. A few doors along, The Old Butchers does breakfasts, lunches, coffee and cake in a former butcher's shop hung with local landscape photography; the person to ask for is Georgina. The Bistro serves modern, locally sourced cooking and has an outside verandah, and the Waterside Café runs pizza and fish-and-chips evenings on Fridays.
The Lochcarron Hotel is the waterside anchor: ten bedrooms, a lounge bar with an open fire, and a restaurant looking straight across the loch to a jetty on the far side. "Our speciality is seafood," the hotel says. The bar keeps three real ales on handpump and around sixty single malts, and dogs are welcome in the lounge.
For a longer meal, the Carron Restaurant at Cam-Allt, near Strathcarron, smokes its own salmon and meat over beech and birch from the neighbouring Attadale Estate. The menu runs to smoked salmon and haddock chowder, venison chilli with smoked potatoes, and a venison burger with smoked-onion marmalade and Blue Murder cheese.
There are several walks starting in or near the village. The Coffin Road circuit is five kilometres and a little over an hour and a half, climbing 116 metres on clear paths and rough ATV tracks that turn boggy; it follows the old route along which coffins were carried between Kishorn and the Kirkton burial ground, and the drove road that brought Applecross cattle to market, before returning beside the loch. From the Smithy Heritage Centre a five-minute woodland loop passes a treehouse above the river — part of a community-owned hub with a willow dome, polytunnel and garden. A firmer path near the weavers climbs through Strome Wood to Stromemeanach, an abandoned township of black-house walls and a circular kiln whose people left for America.
The history here is largely one of leaving. Strome Castle, first recorded in 1472, was a MacDonald stronghold until the Mackenzies of Kintail took it at the end of the sixteenth century and blew up part of it with gunpowder rather than hold it. At Kirkton, the footings of six buildings mark a settlement cleared around 1872. The standing parish church, dated to 1836 by the Highland Historic Environment Record and to around 1840 in its Historic Environment Scotland listing, is a tall harled rectangle with four Gothic windows and a pinnacled bellcote, built for seven or eight hundred worshippers and named An Eaglais Mhor, the Big Church.
The nearest railhead is Strathcarron, on the Inverness–Kyle of Lochalsh line, with the D M K Motors 702 bus running in from there past Kirkton and on toward Torridon; check the times before you rely on them. On the third Saturday of July the Highland Games gather up the loch at Attadale Estate for the caber and the tug-of-war. Lochcarron Camanachd, the shinty team, plays summer fixtures at Battery Park by the water.