Tain

The Station Bar and High Street Table

The trains kept running, while the station building later stood empty and boarded for more than thirty years, until Graham Rooney reopened it in 2015 as Platform 1864. He kept the railway signs, the timetables and the conductors' bags on the walls, so you drink beneath the fittings of a working station in a room that no longer has anything to do with getting anywhere. The bar pours Cromarty Brewing's Happy Chappy, a 4.1% golden ale, and the garden runs to a children's play area. Well-behaved dogs are allowed inside. The name came from a local school competition; the Inverness and Aberdeen Junction Railway opened the line here in 1864, and at its peak the station employed thirty people.

For a small burgh, Tain feeds itself unusually well. William Grant Bakery opened at 1–3 High Street in 1886 and keeps the last traditional Scotch oven in northern Scotland, turning out macaroni pies, haggis pies, venison pies and a tattie-and-bean pie among the more expected chicken and curry. John M Munro, the butcher at 26 Market Street, traces its Ross-shire trade to 1922. Greens Restaurant, further along the High Street, runs a kitchen under head chef Ewan Urquhart and owner Laura Dundas, with Kim MacKay front of house; the menu changes but has lately carried curried lamb shank, burrata with beetroot and pistachio, and a smoked-salmon-and-prawn salad.

Cheese, Market Days and the Royal Hotel

Just outside town, at Blarliath Farm, the Stone family have made cheese since the 1950s. Highland Fine Cheeses produces Morangie Brie, Strathdon Blue and Tain Cheddar, alongside others called Minger, Fat Cow, Blue Murder and Skinny Crowdie. Rory Stone, the present cheesemaker, describes the whole range as "little smelly things."

The Royal Hotel stands at the head of the High Street, a landmark the Maitland family built. On the third Saturday of the month from April to September, the Peninsula Community Market sets up in the Rose Gardens on Lamington Street, with live music and room for families and dogs.

From the Links to Glen Aldie

Tain overlooks the Dornoch Firth, and its walks extend to beaches, woodland and hills. The Links are a low, open strip between the streets and the shore, holding a bowling green, a playpark, a skate park, a wildlife pond and a football pitch, with paths out to the beach. West of town, Morangie Forest rises; the Aldie Burn Trail loops through Glen Aldie for a mile and three quarters, about an hour on wide gravel past gnarled Scots pines, heather and dragonflies working the water. A shorter Pond Trail ends at a salmon-shaped pond made for pond-dipping. Tain Golf Club began in 1889 as fifteen holes laid out by Old Tom Morris; parts of his design survive on eight of the present holes.

Pilgrims, Kings and Sanctuary

The church holds the older story. St Duthus Collegiate Church, a buttressed fourteenth-century building, drew pilgrims and kings: eighteen recorded visits by James IV, and a papal bull of 1492 whose lead seal still hangs from red-and-yellow silk in the town. In 1306 the women of Robert the Bruce's family sought sanctuary in the Girth of Tain and were seized regardless, handed to Edward I, and some of them kept in cages. The church closed in 1815 and now sits roofed and unused within its graveyard, part of the Tain Through Time complex.

Whisky, Roads and a Fairy Reel

Glenmorangie is made at the edge of town, and its staff still call themselves the Distillers of Tain. The A9 runs past on the bypass, Inverness is about forty minutes south, and Stagecoach services from Lamington Street reach Dornoch in a quarter of an hour. Local memory keeps a stranger story: a man who came in to register his baby and buy christening whisky, stepped into a fairy hill, and was pulled out a year and a day later protesting that he had danced only one reel.