The Oyster Inn stands at the junction of the A85 and A828, and the locals call it the Gluepot. The name comes from a blacksmith who once worked behind the building and boiled glue out of the shaved hooves of horses. The pub is happier with its older story: it started life in the 18th century as the Ferryman's Inn, serving the crossing that carried people between Connel and North Lorn before there was a bridge to make the ferry redundant.
Food runs from noon to eight in the Gluepot Bar, Scottish pub cooking with its own-label draught on the taps, a good range of beers, whiskies and gins. Dogs are welcome in the bar. There's a sheltered beer garden round the back and an open fire for the months when the beer garden is a theoretical amenity. The view is of Loch Etive and the Falls of Lora, which is the reason most people stop.
The falls are not a waterfall. They are a tidal race: when a high tide runs back out of the loch over a rocky shelf at the narrows, the water throws up genuine white-water rapids for a few days either side of the spring tides. The entrance is so narrow that a three-metre tide at Oban becomes about 1.3 metres a few miles up the loch. Kayakers come to play in it, divers go under it, and everyone else watches from the viewpoint car park opposite the Oyster Inn.
Above the rapids is the thing you cannot miss. Connel Bridge is a great grey steel cantilever that opened in 1903 to carry the branch line to Ballachulish, with a 524-foot span between piers — a longer railway span than anything in Britain except the Forth Bridge. The trains stopped in 1966 and the bridge became a road, though it is too narrow for two lanes, so traffic still crosses single-file on lights at each end. Donald Sutherland rode a motorcycle across it in Eye of the Needle in 1981.
You can walk it. A cantilevered pedestrian walkway runs alongside the road with the tidal rapid churning directly below. For something longer, the Black Lochs circuit starts at the same viewpoint car park and loops past three small lochs and a few farms to the hamlet of Achaleven, through woodland and moor.
The Falls of Lora Hotel is the enormous Victorian pile above the loch, built in 1894, praised for its fresh fish and its whisky list. Across the bridge in North Connel, the Lochnell Arms is a family-run lochside inn, CAMRA-listed for real ale, with a terrace over the water and dishes cooked to order. Its lounge looks out, in the hotel's own words, "over the famous and often turbulent Falls of Lora."
St Oran's, the parish church, went up in 1887–8 in Gothic Revival to a design by David Mackintosh of Oban, and keeps a fine collection of 20th-century stained glass under an open timbered ceiling. Sunday service is at half past ten.
The village hall keeps its own timetable: carpet bowls, ladies' badminton, ballroom dancing, Zumba, and a class in the clàrsach, the Scottish harp.
