A side-channel photonic crystal fiber (SC-PCF) is proposed and fabricated to serve as a high sensitivity surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) sensing platform. The SC-PCF has a solid core with triangular lattice cladding structure, and one third of the cladding is removed intentionally to enable fast liquid infiltration and enlarge effective interaction area between liquid samples and the fiber core guided lightwave. The geometry of the SC-PCF is designed to obtain high evanescent field power in cladding side-channel, high free space coupling efficiency and low transmission loss at the excitation wavelength of 632.8 nm. Rhodamine 6G (R6G) solutions mixed with gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are used to test the SERS per- formance of the proposed platform. A low detection limit of 50 fM R6G solution is achieved. Moreover, an accumulative effect of SERS signal along the SERS-active fiber length is demonstrated experimentally, and a numerical–analytical model for backward scattering scheme is developed to investigate the dependence of Raman intensity on fiber length.