The Cobbler shows you its three peaks as you arrive. Its jagged, triple-fanged profile stands over the head of Loch Long, and Arrochar sits underneath it, practically at sea level, hemmed in by the steep rock of the Arrochar Alps. Beinn Narnain and Beinn Ìme rise among the surrounding summits. The village runs along the shore of a sea loch that behaves like a fjord, and the pubs sit close to the water.
The Village Inn was built in 1827 as the local manse. Its broad front lawn — the garden, effectively — faces the loch and the mountains, and inside there is a real fire, games and rooms upstairs. The kitchen runs from ham-hock-and-pea terrine and lamb kofta to hand-battered fish and chips, sausages and mash, lamb shank and butternut-squash ravioli. Three changing cask beers are on, often something from Fyne Ales, and dogs are allowed in the bar. It draws locals, day-trippers, hillwalkers and weekend guests.
Ben Arthur's Bothy is smaller, on the main road, with the same loch-and-mountain view and food, though it's worth checking current hours. There is no cask ale, but there are games, dogs are welcome and live music turns up at weekends in season. The Loch Long Hotel keeps a lounge bar and a summer beer garden right on the water, with acoustic afternoons through the warmer months.
For food beyond the pubs, Cù Mara on Shore Road does burgers and pizza from a small, locally sourced menu. The tearoom serves cream-and-jam scones, and there is a fish-and-chip shop. The nearest general store is at Tarbet, a short way along the isthmus by the station.
Many visitors come for the hills. The Cobbler — Ben Arthur — is the obvious one: a little under seven miles from the Succoth car park, four to six hours, nearly a thousand metres of ascent, past the Narnain boulders, with the true summit reached only by a scramble that wants a head for heights. In the 1930s Glasgow shipyard and factory workers, some of them out of work, reached it by bike, bus, train and foot, and slept under the Narnain boulders in rough shelters they called howffs.
If that is too much, the waymarked path to Tarbet is a mile and a half of undulating woodland, about an hour, with views over Arrochar and back to The Cobbler and Beinn Narnain, passing the site of the old torpedo range across the loch. The Glen Loin loop starts here, while the Three Lochs Way passes through Arrochar, and three miles west at Ardgartan an easy family trail runs beside Croe Water, where red squirrels are likely.
The Royal Navy opened that torpedo range in 1912 to fire unarmed torpedoes down the calm water of Loch Long, watch them run and fish them out again. It closed in 1986, and the jetty and slipway remains are still there on the far shore.
The parish church of 1847 stands above the water, a Tudor Gothic hall with a battlemented, pinnacled west tower and a graveyard holding a Celtic cross. The ruin of its predecessor, built in 1733, sits just to the north. The parish had been split off from Luss in 1659 because the journey to church was so long and rough, though the promised building then took another seventy-four years to appear. One night a man named Malcolm Macfarlane, leaving a kirk-session reprimand in a temper, tied old Mary Campbell's goat to the outdoor bell rope. The struggling animal rang it, and the elders inside took fright at "an uncanny looking thing with horns rushing to and fro in the twilight".
The A83 brings you in along the loch, and Citylink coaches on the Glasgow road stop in the village; the station at Arrochar & Tarbet is unstaffed, a mile and a half off by the woodland path. In the evening, you can carry a drink out onto the Village Inn's lawn, where the loch often lies flat and The Cobbler holds its shape over the water until the light goes.