Muir of Ord

Whisky, pies and garden plates

The Singleton of Glen Ord pours its whisky at a circular bar, and it is the only Singleton distillery that lets visitors in at all. It has stood at the edge of the village since 1838, when Thomas Mackenzie built it on land his clan had held for centuries, and it still runs tours, tastings and a bottle-your-own counter alongside a Highland deli and a retail room. The Mackenzie motto it took, *Luceo non uro*, means "I shine not burn." Book a tour ahead.

For food you can carry out, John M Munro on Great North Road is a butcher and a bakery in one. Gary, the butcher, will talk you through cuts and cooking, and the shelves also hold local vegetables, eggs and cheese. The steak pies are the draw — slow-cooked diced steak in the firm's own gravy — and the bakery turns out mince-and-mealy pies, chicken-and-haggis pies, Scotch pies and sausage rolls.

A short way out, Matilda's Garden Restaurant sits within the Estate of Ord, looking over a walled garden and a pond. The owners are Australian and the name nods to Waltzing Matilda. The kitchen leans on home-grown Highland produce: an Estate beef burger built on Munro's beef, beer-battered fish and chips, wild-mushroom risotto, pan-fried cod with a prawn-and-mussel linguine, and West Coast scallops with celeriac purée, apple and truffle oil. There are cakes and afternoon tea if you would rather just sit with the garden.

Takeaways and the old coaching inn

In the village itself, Khan Tandoori on Great North Road does a tandoori mixed grill, chicken biryani, lamb tikka, aloo gobi and tarka dhal to take away, and Deas Bakery at 1 Seaforth Road handles bread, sweet bakes, soup and hot snacks with tea and coffee. Bad Girl Bakery keeps its development kitchen and cook school here, though the café has moved to Inverness.

The Ord Arms Hotel began as a coaching inn on the old Great North Road in 1904 and now holds a public bar, two dining rooms and a function suite, refurbished under new management in 2024. Its Signature Burger stacks maple-glazed pulled pork on a prime steak patty, and there is house-made soup with bread. The garden comes with a pool table, darts, a real fire and, some nights, live bands and karaoke; the beer is Black Isle, on keg rather than cask. The Tarradale Hotel on Black Isle Road pours drinks but does not do meals.

Paths, hill views and heathland holes

Walking starts more or less at the door. Short core paths thread out to School Loch and Lily Loch and along the bed of the old railway through Spittal Wood, with the Distillery-to-Highfield and Gilchrist-to-Tarradale routes stitching the rest together. For height, Cnoc Croit na Maoile — Ord Hill — is a 2.5-mile there-and-back through Scots pine, birch and hazel, climbing steeply and sometimes boggily over the last stretch to a trig point. From the top the view runs to Ben Wyvis, the Black Isle, the Cromarty and Beauly firths and the Glen Affric hills. There is no bus to the start.

The golf club plays eighteen heathland holes with Ben Wyvis and Beauly Firth in view. The first nine were laid out in 1875, the second designed by James Braid and opened in 1927; visitors and non-golfers are welcome.

Crossroads, railway and older stone

The village grew where paths crossed. Cattle driven down from the north and west were sold here before the long walk south, and the railway and distillery did the rest. The Black Isle branch line ran to Fortrose from 1894 until passengers stopped in 1951, and parts of its route are now the paths you walk. The Ordnance Gazetteer of the 1880s called the ground "a tabular or flat surface, and a sandy soil," which is roughly what the approach still shows: arable country of potatoes, barley, oats and oilseed rape rather than a mountain glen.

The older history sits in stone. The East Church, red sandstone with tripartite windows and a single bell tower, went up in 1911. Ord Cottage began as an 18th-century Episcopal church and became a house once St Mary's opened at Highfield in 1836. Older than both is the ruined Old Church of Kilchrist, now the mausoleum of the Mackenzie Gillanders family; tradition holds that in 1603 a party of MacDonalds locked a Mackenzie congregation inside and set the roof alight while a piper walked the walls to cover the noise.

Arriving and sharing

Getting here is straightforward. The station sits on Corry Road with a waiting room and free parking but no staff or toilets, trains run to Inverness, and the 28 and 28A buses serve Muir of Ord.

At the Muir Hub, MoO Food keeps a community orchard, growing boxes and a community fridge, open for people to take what they'll use or drop off suitable food.