The Climber's Bar at the Glen Clova Hotel keeps a log-fired stove going, and the people drying out in front of it have often come down off a hill that afternoon. This is Milton of Clova, a scatter of buildings in the broad floor of Glen Clova, beside the River South Esk and beneath a wall of steep corries. There is no shop in the glen itself, no butcher, no bakery — Kirriemuir and Forfar, half an hour down the road, are where you stock up. The hotel is the visitor hub here, and has been since it opened in 1850 as the Ogilvy Arms.
The Batchelor family bought it in July 1922, and it is still run by the same line: it now belongs to Mrs Batchelor's great-grandson, Hugh Niven, and his family. You can eat in three places under one roof. The Climber's Bar is the walkers' room. The Glen Logie is the main dining room. The Brandy Bothy is the informal space in between. Beef, lamb and venison come off the surrounding estate, and the kitchen changes its menus with the seasons; past menus have run to Cullen skink, pheasant pakora, venison chilli, coronation pheasant and loaded home-grown chips.
They brew under their own name too. Clova Ale sits alongside beers from the Burnside Brewery, and there are usually a couple of changing Scottish ales on the handpumps. Dogs are welcome in the Climber's Bar and the Brandy Bothy, on leads, and the bar keeps water down for them. Outside, the garden has a good spread of tables, some of them under a heated marquee for the days the weather does what it does here.
Most people come to walk. The climb to Loch Brandy starts beside the hotel itself, a steep 5.5 kilometres up to a mountain corrie and its loch. For the set piece, the road runs on north past the village to the car park at Glen Doll, where the Corrie Fee trail heads 6.9 kilometres into a glacial amphitheatre, past moraines, a waterfall and one of the largest natural stands of montane willow scrub in Scotland. Golden eagles and peregrines work the crags overhead, and arctic-alpine plants cling on where little else does. Fitter walkers carry on from the same car park over Mayar and Driesh, two Munros on a fourteen-and-a-half-kilometre circuit that needs a map and proper hill kit. Glen Doll has accessible picnic tables, a fully accessible toilet open around the clock, and displays explaining the ground you are about to cross.
The little Clova Parish Kirk was built in 1855 on the site of an earlier church, four bays of Aberdeen-bonded granite with red-sandstone dressings, a birdcage bellcote and lattice glazing. The community bought it in 2006 and still uses it for services and weddings. The churchyard is mostly nineteenth-century stones, with a few weathered eighteenth-century ones among them.
The glen carries more history than its size suggests. A turf-covered mound near the village is Clova Castle, a late-medieval ruin with about three metres of its circular stair tower still standing. A Late Bronze Age hoard of two spearheads and a sword was pulled out of a rabbit burrow here, partly by a man from Tarriebuckle and partly by the children who followed up his find. On 21 April 1746, weeks after Culloden, Lord Ogilvy's Jacobite regiment was formally disbanded at Clova.
The old drove road over Jock's Road climbs out of the glen towards Deeside, and in the 1880s it became an important Scottish access dispute over the right to walk. Walter Arthur Smith, who spent a night at the inn during the 1885 expedition to plant guideposts on the disputed line, wrote of leaving in the morning: "The beautiful green hills of Glen Clova, which were covered with mist in the early morning, are becoming clear."
Getting here means the B955 up from Kirriemuir, the last stretch a single track with passing places where deer step out without warning. Dundee, about thirty-five miles and an hour off, is the station the hotel points you towards. By the time you reach the stove in the Climber's Bar, the drive feels like part of the walk.