The first faltering steps of the Carr settlement
From an article in The Strathspey and Badenoch Herald, by G A Dixon.
The presence of bridges in the immediate vicinity plainly influenced
the choice of locations for such crofting settlements of the 1790's as
Speybridge and Skye of Curr. And at Carr further up the Dulnan, as we
have already seen, the new bridge of 1791 bore first the Kinveachy-Dulsie
Bridge military road and them from 1803, the main Perth-Inverness road
as well. 
The T-junction at the new bridge was, from then on, in effect a settlement site in waiting. What came first, however, was an inn, to make good the lack of any such travellers' refuge along the 20 miles or so between Aviemore and Dulsie Bridge. The first innkeeper at the Bridge of Carr, from the very year of the main road diversion, was George Ellis junior, a son of the Huntly weaver who had somewhat reluctantly left his lowland hone a generation earlier to supervise the work of the Grantown Linen Company's manufactory in Strathspey.
Young Ellis had been a sergeant in both the Strathspey Fencibles and the Inverness-shire Highlanders, and by 1803 was Sergeant Major of the local Volunteers, a fact which stood him in good stead when he was accused early in the following year of beating up his fellow innkeeper, James Brander, Pitmain.
Ellis died in 1823, aged 55, and the inn - the ancestor of Carrbridge Hotel - remained for many years in the charge of his redoubtable wife Betty (1774-1853), a daughter of Archie Haston, wright in the New Grantown. Mrs Ellis' influential role in early Carrbridge was to evoke at least faint echoes of that of Mrs McKenzie in early Tomintoul.
If we can believe the figures given in the Old Statistical Account of Duthil and the 1801 census, the parish population increased by a third during the closing eight years of the 18th century. Even if the actual rise was appreciably less, the existence of an unmet demand for lots in the neighbourhood of the new road junction and inn was plainly evident during the first decade of the new century.
As the Strathspey Wood Manager, himself a Duthil man, Capt. Alexander Cumming, Docharn, put it to the old Factor, James Grant, in May 1807: "There are many people speaking to me about leave to build houses on the .... moor betwixt Dalrachnymore and Dalrachnybegg ... You gave one or two leave to build there already, which I think was quite proper as these poor devils must be some where. "From the desire so many have to build in that place, I am convinced I was right in what I formerly suggested to you that a little Village would answer well at & about the bridge of Carr".
Sir James Grant agreed and by the following year John Sim, one of George Brown's assistants, had drawn out a "Plan of the intended Village at the Bridge of Carr". Over 70 plots were shown upon it, 42 of 24 falls (three-twentieths of a Scotch acre) each, 21 of half-an-acre each, and one of almost three-quarters of an acre, all south of the bridge, and seven of one-and-a-half acres each, north of the bridge. The new planned village, destined to be the last of the Good Sir James' various foundations in either Strathspey or Glenurquhart, was intended to offer a range of lot sizes from ordinary building plots up to what were, in effect, to be small crofts on the Bogroy land running along the new main road to the west of the inn. Again, however, as at Kingussie, very severe weather handicapped the growth of the infant settlement.
The failure of the 1807 harvest - as George Brown commented to Sir James that November: "the Crop is in a most Deplorable State, much is lost, by the Season, and in all the Highland districts, the Potato Crop, is completely spoiled by the Rains" - was followed by a run of very difficult years, most notably 1812-13 and 1816-17 (the latter in the wake of the eruption of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which blew 4,000 feet off the top of the volcano, and through the resulting dust layer in the atmosphere ruined the next years growing season even in Europe and North America).
But it was not just the weather that impeded settlement at Carrbridge. No provision was made for adequately employing those taking building plots as distinct from the little crofting lots. The latter were let relatively quickly - eight of the Bogroy lots were let on 19-year leases from May 1809 - but the longer building leases on the much smaller plots proved far less attractive. Sir James was by now an old man, increasingly afflicted by the asthma which was soon to kill him, and weighed down by administrative ,estate, family and financial cares, and his postponing of the detailed decisions necessary to complete the founding process left them still untaken when he died early in 1811.
With his death, the drive for major change in Strathspey was switched off for almost half a century, and his effective successor - his fourth son, Col Francis William Grant - was in general much more anxious to conserve his fathers advances than launch out on new ones of his own. Even the formal, south-bank planned layout of Carrbridge, having never actually been implemented by Sir James, was left in limbo by his son. Major John Grant, Auchterblair, told Col Grant in March 1813: "I think your fathers intended Village, will take place".
Within the following three years or so, at least six prospective settlers asked for building plots. Actual building progress was slow indeed, however, and by the 1860's only about a dozen plots had been developed on the east side of the road south of the bridge, and a less regular cluster of plots has come to occupy the angle of the road up to Ellan on the west side.
It was to take the arrival as a loyal summer visitor of Professor Henry Calderwood in the 1880's and the opening of the new spur railway in the 1890's to advance Carrbridge from hamlet to village. By then, Captain Cumming's, Sir James Grant's and John Sim's Georgian plans had long since fallen from local memory.