The old ticket office at Strathcarron station is a private apartment now, but the original passing-loop point levers are still in place inside it, left where the signalmen last threw them. The station opened in 1870, and its lattice-girder footbridge, cast by the Rose Street Foundry in Inverness, has crossed the two platforms since 1900. There is a waiting room, some seating and four parking spaces. No ticket machine, no staff. This is one of only three passing places on the single-track line between Dingwall and Kyle, which is more responsibility than the four cars in the car park would suggest.
Across the junction stands the Strathcarron Hotel, a Victorian railway hotel that has faced the platforms since the line arrived. Richard and Becca run it. There is a bar, a lounge and a café-restaurant, a beer garden for the rare dry evening, and enough indoors to fill a wet afternoon: pool, darts, table football and board games. The ales are local, and a recent guest found Skye Ale on draught. The kitchen leans on the Highlands, and a recent guest came away talking about haggis, haggis pizza and a full cooked breakfast. One visitor called it "full of warmth and character."
For dinner with a little more ceremony, Carron Restaurant at Cam-allt cooks seasonal Scottish meat and fish, much of it smoked on site over beech and birch cut from the neighbouring Attadale Estate. The menu has run to smoked-salmon-and-haddock chowder, miso-honey pork belly bites, crab on toast, a venison burger with smoked-onion marmalade and Blue Murder cheese, venison chilli, and smoked cauliflower cheese for anyone skipping the meat. Only guide dogs come inside.
At Ribhuachan you can walk into the Lochcarron Weavers heritage shop, where the tartan, tweed, knitwear and made-to-measure kilts sit alongside weaving displays. The business goes back to a small factory at North Strome, set up in 1938, where a weaver named Issac Wood came down from Galashiels to teach local men on four looms. The looms are long gone from here, but the shop kept going and moved to its present home in 2023.
The reason to stay, though, is the ground beyond the doorstep. Glen Carron opens out at the head of a broad sea loch, among regenerating pinewoods and lochans, with sandstone mountains to the north and the Monar wilderness behind them to the south. From the walkers' car park just off the A890 at Attadale, a circuit of about seven and a quarter miles climbs past Loch an Iasaich on estate and hydro tracks, wet forestry underfoot and a steep pull in the middle, before the valley opens back down to Loch Carron. Further up the line at Achnashellach, a longer route crosses the Coulin Pass to Torridon, past the River Làir, the Easan Dorcha waterfall and old Scots pines, under the bulk of Fuar Tholl, Beinn Eighe and Liathach. The weather turns fast and the phone signal fails early, so a map, a compass and warm waterproofs are not optional.
The nearest church, the East Church at Kirkton, is about two miles off: a tall harled rectangle built in 1836 by James Smith of Inverness, with four Gothic Y-tracery windows and a pinnacled bellcote. They once called it An Eaglais Mhòr, the Big Church; it was deconsecrated around 2005 and is a private house now.
Attadale Gardens lie a request stop down the line: twenty acres of water gardens, a Japanese garden and a scattering of sculpture, all set against Loch Carron. There is pond dipping for children and a café you serve yourself, and dogs are welcome on a short lead. If you have no car, the 702 bus runs from the station through Kirkton and Lochcarron, and on some days keeps going through Kishorn and Shieldaig to Annat, near Torridon.
Writing of this loch in 1836, the Reverend John Mackenzie described it as "embosomed in hills" and noted birch and alder growing in the glen too. The last train on weekdays and Saturdays still stops if you are on the platform to meet it.