Scottish Cafes we like – Introduction

Cafés are seriously important if you are into travelling in Scotland, especially if outdoor type activities are your thing. Whatever it is you choose to do (climbing, walking and hitting the animal park tour is ours), the rigours of the Scottish climate will demand a nice place to go and recover afterwards. This might mean chilling out, thawing out, pigging out (otherwise known as refuelling), or drying out depending what the Gulf Stream decides to throw at you on any particular day.

When you’ve spent as much time in cafs waiting for the conditions to improve as we have, you’ll understand why it becomes a pretty critical (if often unspoken) factor in deciding on destinations for your latest adventure.

We feel our combined years of being climbers, together with Dave’s tea addiction have earned us expert status in this subject. So on this blog we’ll take you through the best spots for tea-and-a-bun you’ll find in these islands, with some stories of how we discovered them. Some of them are fairly well hidden so we hope our posts will help you find a place to sit out some less than perfect weather conditions in some remote corner of the Highlands, or just find some lovely food to refresh you for wherever your explorations take you next.

First up – Birnam café

Scottish Cafes we like – Birnam Café

Most folks passing through Perthshire end up in the tourist laden hives of Dunkeld or Pitlochry. But although Birnam village is virtually joined onto Dunkeld, the trail of activities leads away from it, and most folks never pass through. Perhaps the fact that the new A9 cut Birnam off from the flow of northward traffic allowed Birnam caf to seemingly freeze into an image of what the highlands must have been like many decades ago in a quieter age.

As you sit and wait for your traditional leaf tea and stack of cakes and pancakes on a silver cake stand, you peer at the wall stacked with a trillion varieties of enticing looking boiled sweets. Cubby first introduced us to the caf. He is really the man to be writing this post as he’s been going there for 20 years, usually after a training session for the first rock climbing world cup competitions at the cave crags above Dunkeld. Dave and I sat there and drank tea nervously in June 2003 before he free soloed the tube cave just across the Tay at Birnam Quarry.

A visit to the café is a bit like watching an episode of Weir’s Way – a step back in time to a kind of rose tinted vision of highland life before the world got flat. A rare and nice experience to have these days.