Roybridge

Two village inns

The Stronlossit Inn stands just off the A86, near Roy Bridge's unstaffed station, with a log fire in the snug and a beer garden. Three cask ales rotate on the handpumps, usually from Cairngorm, the Isle of Skye and Orkney. Recent menus have included baked goat's cheese with roasted Mediterranean vegetables, an Aberdeen Angus burger, beer-battered North Sea haddock and sticky toffee pudding. Children are welcome in the bar, and dogs are generally too, though it's worth checking on the day.

The other pub is the Roy Bridge Hotel, a coaching inn that dates itself to the 1850s, with a public bar, an enclosed beer garden and more than sixty malt whiskies. Ring ahead on the day if you're planning to eat there.

Food, supplies and getting around

For daytime food and the basics, Glen Roy Cafe doubles as the village shop, pouring espresso and tea and putting out traybakes, morning rolls, toasties and soup while keeping bread and milk on the shelf. A few miles west at Spean Bridge, Glen Spean Brewing runs a cellar door in a converted mid-nineteenth-century steading; its Snowgoose lager took the overall Highlands and Islands Food and Drink Award in 2019, and you can also pick up Highbridge session ale and the blackcurrant-and-vanilla porter it calls Dark Mile.

Roybridge sits where the Rivers Roy and Spean meet, with the A86 and the West Highland railway threaded through together and Maol Ruadh rising immediately to the north. The station has seats, a departure screen and a help point, but no ticket machine and no toilets. Trains and the Shiel bus to Spean Bridge, Nevis Range and Fort William both run, though sparely enough to plan around, and the bus doesn't run on Sundays. Fort William, about thirteen miles west, holds the larger shops.

Woodland circuit and Parallel Roads

A walk from the door is the Achaderry and River Spean circuit, six kilometres through native woodland, past a lochan and along the wooded ravine of the Spean. Parts of the return are rough and very boggy, and the route crosses the fast A86 more than once, so it wants dry feet and some attention.

Directly north, Glen Roy carries the sight the village is known for: horizontal shorelines running level along the flanks of the glen, the beaches of ice-dammed lakes that formed and drained at the end of the last Ice Age. They can be seen from the roadside viewpoint several kilometres up the glen, which spares you the pathless bracken of the full walking circuit. Charles Darwin came in 1839, decided the terraces were raised sea beaches, and held to that long after the argument had gone against him. "And I am ashamed of it," he wrote later.

Battlefield stories and two churches

The slope immediately north was the site of the Battle of Mulroy in 1688. A private soldier called Donald MacBane left an unusually detailed account of the hour-long firefight; he later fled the field, ran a brothel, taught fencing and published a manual of swordsmanship.

The village has two Catholic churches. St Margaret's, grey granite trimmed with pink sandstone under a square southwest tower, was built in 1929 to a design by Reginald Fairlie, its stone partly reused from the old Bunroy chapel; Mary MacKillop had stayed nearby at the Chapel House one November in 1873. Two kilometres out, on a hill said to be the site of St Cairell's cell, the fifteenth-century Cille Choirill holds the graves of the Gaelic poets Iain Lom and Dòmhnall Mac Fhionnlaidh nan Dàn in its burial ground.

The key to Cille Choirill

Cille Choirill is usually locked. The key hangs on a fencepost outside the house at the bottom of the road, and you are left to let yourself in and put it back.