A life-size bronze golden retriever stands in the middle of Tomich, and it is not there for decoration. The breed began on the estate above the village. In 1868 Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks, who owned Guisachan, mated a wavy-coated retriever with a Tweed Water Spaniel, and their three pups founded the line. A second marker tells the story out by the ruined mansion; the bronze stands among the stone cottages, as though it still lives here.
The cottages are the point of the place. Tomich is a stone-built conservation village at the upper end of Strathglass, where the road begins its climb toward Glen Affric and the hills close in on either side. Marjoribanks built it in the 1850s as a model village, moving his estate tenants down from their crofts and giving them twenty-five houses along with a school, a church, a post office, a shop and a garage. Several of those buildings survive, repurposed for other uses today.
The old coach house is now the Coach House Café, which held the village post office until 2018 and kept the 1930s GPO posters on the wall after the counter went. It serves snacks through the day: all-day breakfast, panini, quesadillas, wraps, toasties, burgers and soup. It is a place in the village to sit down with something hot, and worth knowing about before you set off for the falls, because there are no cafés or shops once you are past the last house.
The Tomich Hotel anchors the other end. It started life as quarters for the estate's stalkers and keepers, later becoming a Victorian country hotel that once had a beer garden behind it. At the time of writing it is closed for a full renovation and due to reopen, so treat the bar as a promise rather than a plan. For groceries, whisky, maps, newspapers and the general run of a village shop, the family-run Cannich Stores a few miles down the glen serves Tomich and the outlying communities around it.
What you come here to walk is Plodda Falls, five miles beyond the village at the end of a single-track road and then a forest track. The waymarked circuit is about a mile and a half, an hour or so on rugged paths with steps and steep sections, dropping through tall Douglas firs to the foot of a waterfall of more than forty metres and back up to the cantilevered lip at the top. Lord Tweedmouth planted those firs and built the carriage drive; timber from the same woods went into the masts of Captain Scott's Discovery. There is free parking and picnic space at the trailhead, no bus, and very little phone signal once you are in the glen.
Closer to home, a narrow lane of just over a kilometre reaches the fenced ruins of Guisachan House itself. The grounds are open, but livestock graze them and dogs should stay on the lead. The house once entertained the future George V, Churchill and Gladstone, and its drawing room had Wedgwood Jasperware set into the chimneypiece and walls. Lady Islington bought it in 1939, objected to the National Fitness Campaign training centre then using it, and had it stripped and unroofed; it deteriorated into the present ruin.
Getting here means the A831 from Drumnadrochit toward Cannich and then the signed minor road; Beauly is the nearest railhead, with the request bus to Beauly Square running Tuesdays and Saturdays if you email the day before. Marjoribanks was once asked what made him buy the estate. "Simply the game," he said. The retriever in the street is what the game left behind.