Had you seen these roads before they were made, you would lift up your hands and bless General Wade. Major William Caulfeild's couplet, written for the engineer who replaced Highland cattle tracks with proper military roads, sums up the place Aberfeldy was built to crystallise. The town sits where the Crieff to Dalnacardoch military road crossed the River Tay, and the bridge that carried it, designed by William Adam and completed in 1734, was the most expensive single structure in the whole Wade network. Aberfeldy grew up around that crossing in the 19th century as a resort for Victorians coming to take the waters and walk the birch glen south of town that had moved Robert Burns to verse. It has stayed that kind of town ever since.
The 1715 Jacobite rebellion had shown Edinburgh that the Highlands could not be controlled without a road network. General George Wade, Scotland's military commander from 1724 to 1740, set about building one. The Crieff to Dalnacardoch road, built in 1730, needed to cross the Tay at Aberfeldy, and Wade hired William Adam, the most prominent Scottish architect of the day, to design a bridge worthy of the king who had ordered it. The result, opened in 1735, has five arches and is built of grey-green stone. When Wade retired, his assistant Major William Caulfeild took over the network and coined the verse that has been quoted ever since. The Jacobites rose again in 1745, and the next time they made it all the way to Derby. Bless these new roads, indeed.
Robert Burns walked the birch glen south of the village in 1787, the year of his Highland tour. The glen rises steeply through silver birches to the Falls of Moness, and Burns turned what he saw into one of his pastoral lyrics, The Birks of Aberfeldy, set to a fiddle tune already in circulation. The song stuck. The glen is now a popular walk with engineered paths and bridges that William Wordsworth, visiting in 1815, found insufferably neat. Wordsworth was always a difficult tourist. The town also has a McGonagall Bridge, named with deliberate irony for the famously bad poet William McGonagall, whose ode to Aberfeldy is sublimely awful even by his own exacting standards. Both poets passed through. Only one is remembered for getting it right.
Three miles west of Aberfeldy along the B846 lies the tiny farming hamlet of Dull. There was a monastery here in the 7th century; the carvings and grave slabs are now in the National Museum of Scotland. There is essentially nothing here now except the village sign. In 2012 Dull began trading on its name, formally twinning with the town of Boring, near Portland, Oregon. The photo opportunities wrote themselves. In 2013 Bland, New South Wales joined in, and the three communities began marketing themselves as the League of Extraordinary Communities. Visitors stop, photograph the sign, post the photograph, and drive on. It is now Dull's main industry. The deeper irony is that Dull is set in spectacularly beautiful country, with views north toward Schiehallion and south across the Tay, and is one of the loveliest places in central Scotland to be from.
West of Aberfeldy the country opens into bigger landscapes. Schiehallion, the conical Munro that Scots call the Mount Fuji of Scotland for its near-perfect shape, rises to 1,083 metres ten miles away. Its symmetry made its volume easy to calculate, and in 1774 astronomer Nevil Maskelyne used it to estimate the earth's mass by measuring the deflection of a pendulum nearby. Further on, Ben Lawers brood over Loch Tay at 1,214 metres, an arctic-alpine peak whose strata turned out to be entirely inverted, a discovery that overturned 19th-century geological assumptions. Past Loch Tay's narrow north shore lies Glen Lyon, eight scenic miles of glen anchored at Fortingall by a churchyard yew tree believed to be over 2,000 years old. Local legend, with no evidence whatever, claims Pontius Pilate was born here. The yew is real. The legend is not.
Aberfeldy proper has 1,940 residents as of 2021, give or take. The main street has the Fountain Bar and the Black Watch Inn for drink, several cafes and curry houses for food, and a Coop open until 11pm. The Birks Cinema, a restored Art Deco building in the town centre, shows films and runs a daily cafe. Stagecoach Bus 23 runs from Perth every two hours Monday to Saturday, taking ninety minutes via Birnam and Dunkeld. The Aberfeldy Show and Games run combined with the Atholl and Breadalbane Highland Gathering on the second Saturday of August. White-water rafting companies operate along the Tay and the Tummel, both reliably cold no matter the season. Aberfeldy Golf Club next to Wade's Bridge is nine holes, par 68 played twice round, twenty pounds for a visitor. The 19th century built the town as a resort and the 21st century has done little to change the formula.
Aberfeldy lies at 56.62 degrees N, 3.87 degrees W on the south bank of the River Tay in central Perthshire. Recommended viewing altitude 3,000 to 5,000 feet AGL. Wade's Bridge crosses the Tay just east of the town centre. The Highland boundary runs through this area, with the Lowland fields giving way to mountains as you move north and west. Schiehallion stands conspicuously to the west; Ben Lawers and Loch Tay further west again. Nearest airport is Perth/Scone (EGPT) approximately 25 nm to the south-southeast. Dundee (EGPN) lies about 35 nm east-southeast. The A9 main road runs about 10 nm east. Mountain weather can build quickly here; expect lenticular clouds in lee waves from Schiehallion in strong westerlies.