The Black Bull stands over The Square in the middle of Gartmore, a three-storey inn that has poured drink on this spot since at least 1740. The villagers bought it themselves in 2019, refurbished it and added a Heritage Room; it is now the only pub left in a place that used to have two. Schiehallion is kept on tap alongside a rotating guest beer from small Scottish breweries and the pub's own Black Bull Lager, and there is a beer garden for the afternoons that permit one. Dogs are welcome in the bar, the Heritage Rooms and the Green Room, though not the main restaurant, and the kitchen asks you to say in advance if you are bringing one. The food runs from traditional Scottish cooking to lighter contemporary plates.
The pub keeps one wartime detail. Gartmore sat beside the AW25 munitions depot, and a secret telephone beneath the bar would alert the landlord to sound a hidden air-raid siren. "It's one of the most crazy, heartwarming adventures I've had – we've bought the pub," said the journalist Melanie Reid of the purchase.
The village around it is a planned one, set out by the Graham family in the eighteenth century along a Highland cattle-droving route that ran down to Falkirk. Main Street climbs from both ends to meet at The Square, so the roofline never quite settles into the straight lines the formal layout intended. At the north-east end a crenellated semi-circular estate arch, the Village Gate, has stood since 1790.
Gartmore Church went up the same year, a five-bay chapel of ease, and H and D Barclay recast it in 1904, adding the central porch and bellcote. Inside there is an 1800 bell, a semi-octagonal timber pulpit carved with putti, a four-column font and early-twentieth-century stained glass given by the Cayzer family. The earliest gravestone in the walled churchyard is dated 1793.
The land itself changes here. Gartmore sits on the Highland Boundary Fault, where the enclosed Lowland fields and small woods to the south and east give way to steeper hills, lochs and forest to the north and west. From the village you can pick out the Campsie Fells to the south, the Menteith Hills to the north, Ben Lomond to the west and the flat expanse of Flanders Moss to the east.
National Cycle Route 7 passes through Gartmore, and the seven-mile Aberfoyle–Gartmore cycle loop follows the disused railway, minor roads and farm tracks past the memorial to Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, the last Graham laird, who wrote and travelled under the name Don Roberto and sold the estate to the shipping magnate Sir Charles Cayzer in 1900. About half of it is traffic-free.
Gartmore lies just off the A81, roughly twenty miles from Stirling and twenty-four from Glasgow; the X10A bus stops inside the village at the church and the football park. The nearest trains are at Stirling, the local station having closed in 1950.
The community shop, opened in 1998 when more than a hundred residents clubbed together to save it, closed in 2022 and has been approved for conversion into a dwelling. What the Gartmore Community Trust still runs is the hall, the play park and the football field, and with them Gala Day, Bonfire Night, indoor carpet bowls and Summer Ice, a game the village describes as unique to the area and plays in a local league.