Onich

Highland plates beside Loch Linnhe

At Inchree, on the bank of Loch Linnhe, Roam West is a year-round pub, restaurant and lodge with a roaring fire, locally sourced cooking, whisky flights and local real ales. The menu includes Great Glen rarebit with whisky Highland-cheese sauce, wild venison pie, and Mac and Mull macaroni cheese. There is haggis, neeps and tatties, and an Inchree trifle mess to finish. It carries VisitScotland's Taste Our Best award and does the practical things a walking base should — family rooms, breakfast bags, packed lunches. One visitor, Peter, left it at "the pub on site was great too, good food and music."

A little way along the A82, the Onich Hotel serves non-residents at its Lochside Bar and Restaurant and offers direct views across Loch Linnhe. The menu is broad and unfussy: Cullen skink, Scottish smoked salmon, haggis bon-bons with a whisky dipping sauce, battered haddock and chips, a Scottish-beef steak-and-ale pie, a house curry that comes as chicken or aloo chana, and sticky toffee pudding or banoffee cheesecake to close.

A roadside bite, then eight falls

For something quicker, Yum Yum Burgers works a snack van in the grounds of the Lodge on the Loch, two miles south of Inchree, with picnic tables turned to face the scenery.

The walking here is the best reason to stop. From the Glenrigh Forest car park, a waymarked three-mile circuit climbs through the trees to two viewpoints over the eight falls of the Abhainn Rìgh, then opens onto Loch Linnhe before dropping back. It is not a gentle stroll — 278 metres of ascent packed into five kilometres — but the paths are good, and it ends near a screened feeding station where you can wait for red squirrels. Part of the route follows an old military road. It is usually called Wade's Road, though Wade did not build it; his successor, General Caulfield, laid it out after the 1715 rising, when the government wanted quicker ways to move troops through the glens.

Stone, story and the Appin Syncline

Near the shore stands Clach-a-Charra, a perforated stone a little over two metres high, somewhere between Neolithic and Late Bronze Age in date. Local tradition ties it to the killing of two sons of Cummin of Inverlochy, in revenge for a wrong done to a vassal's bride, though the two holes that give the stone its name appear to be natural.

Onich sits where Loch Linnhe nears its meeting with Loch Leven. The ground behind the village is protected for its ancient or long-established oak and ash woodland, its mire and fen, and the slate, schist, limestone and quartzite exposed along the shore, which helped pioneer methods used to interpret the wider Appin Syncline.

St Bride’s and the road onwards

St Bride's Episcopal Church, up from the loch, is a small Gothic building of rubble stone with red-sandstone dressings, lancet windows and a West Highland slate roof. Alexander Ross designed it in 1875 for Lady Ewing, wife of a former Bishop of Argyll. Inside are stained glass, a double piscina and a vestry screen painted with flowers; the memorial cross by the porch copies the High Cross at Oronsay Priory.

Fort William is about twenty minutes north, with the railway station, Ben Nevis and Ben Nevis Distillery, founded in 1825. Glencoe is the same distance the other way. The A82 runs past the door, Shiel Buses' 44 calls at the Onich post office on its way between Fort William and Kinlochleven, and at the Corran narrows a ferry crosses to Ardgour in about five minutes on a first-come, first-served basis; sailings do not run to a fixed daily guarantee.

Nine holes and a final wildlife wait

There is a nine-hole golf course too, pay and play, laid out between the mountains and the water's edge. After the falls, return to Glenrigh Forest car park and watch for red squirrels from the wooden screen at its back.