The all-day breakfast at Deli in the Square comes with Lorne sausage, bacon, egg, black pudding and haggis, and if that is too much before noon there are haggis-and-cheese toasties, local haddock and chips, and pizzas named Cajun Feast and Something Fishy. The burgers run to a black-pudding one and a haggis one. The place is a restaurant, bar and deli on the village square, and it takes ingredients from nearby suppliers where it can.
The square is the middle of a Victorian spa village dropped into a wooded Highland valley, with Ben Wyvis, Strathconon and the Fannichs rising behind the trees. The spa landscape was laid out for gentle exercise and leisure, part of the cure itself. The Pump Room, tile-lined and topped with a small wooden cupola, began around 1860 and was enlarged twice; the Spa Pavilion above it, designed by W. C. Joass, kept the concert hall, reading gallery and billiards that gave the resort its evenings.
Around the square you can fill a morning without much effort. The Strathpeffer Sweet Company sells retro sweets, chocolates, ice cream and waffles. The Coffee Shop & Ice Cream Parlour has run for years under a 1950s American-diner theme and is known for its soft-serve. Station Trading, a community shop at the Old Station, refills dried foods, herbs, spices and cleaning products and stocks second-hand books, local crafts and Fairtrade goods. The Spa Pharmacy carries soap from the Strathpeffer Spa Soap Company alongside the usual shelves.
The Old Station is a short walk from the centre. Its covered Victorian platform now holds the Highland Museum of Childhood, which grew from local resident Angela Kellie's collection of dolls and now covers toys, prams, school life and the railway. Gold at the Old Station serves tea on the platform, indoors and out, and keeps a dog menu.
For a drink and a plate by the fire, the Strathview Lounge at the Ben Wyvis Hotel does light bites, with a dinner menu that changes with the seasons but has included Scotch broth, venison, chicken Balmoral and homemade shortbread. The Highland Hotel leans on Scottish food and whisky, and the golf club's 19th Hole is open to non-golfers for the view.
Walking starts at the door. A heritage walk loops out of the square in about an hour, and the Peffery Way initially follows the former railway alignment off-road towards Dingwall. Above the village, Blackmuir Wood has the Red Kite Trail, a gravel loop of a little over a mile with a lochan and mountain views, and the Touchstone Maze, a labyrinth built from more than eighty Highland rocks, one of them Lewisian gneiss roughly three thousand million years old.
The waters that made the place were sulphurous and iron-rich. Dr Morrison, who moved here after they reportedly cured his rheumatism, prescribed a six-week stay and three or four tumblers morning and afternoon. The estate factor Andrew Scott wrote in 1857 that they were "so beastly as to prove there must be some virtue/reality in it." The branch opened in 1885, and later sleeper trains from London brought visitors anyway.
On the village edge is Castle Leod, seat of Clan Mackenzie for more than five hundred years and the model for Castle Leoch in Outlander; its grounds host the Highland Gathering. Dingwall, five miles off, has the nearest railway station, with the A834 and the Stagecoach 27 running between. Back at the platform, the tea comes out to the benches under the old station roof, and the dogs get a menu of their own.