Inverarnan

A bear in the dark

The Drovers Inn keeps a full-grown stuffed grizzly bear on display, which is not the first thing most people notice about the bar. That would be the dark. The room is small and low-lit, warmed by a fire and hung with taxidermy. The inn trades under the date 1705. It is the centre of Inverarnan, a hamlet at the north end of Loch Lomond where the River Falloch runs down into the water and the ground rises into Glen Falloch behind it.

The inn does the food you would want after a wet day: Stornoway black-pudding fritters, smoked-mackerel pâté, haggis with neeps and tatties, Scottish haddock and chips, mince and tatties, a homemade Scotch mince pie, a venison burger, and apple-and-berry crumble or sticky toffee pudding to finish. Dogs are welcome in the bar and the rooms. Children get fish goujons, chicken goujons and macaroni cheese. The building has a Category B listing, an 18th-century core and substantial Victorian additions. Its house ghost story tells of a crofting family who never made it up the glen in the winter of 1792.

Food and supplies for wet boots

The other bar is the Stagger Inn, part of Beinglas Campsite a little further along. It is built for walkers and makes no pretence otherwise, serving home-cooked food on a walk-in basis: Thai fishcakes, wild mushrooms on sourdough, a steak-and-ale pot pie, beef-shin ragù, a smoked-haddock and prawn fish pie, a falafel burger and toffee-apple crumble. Both pubs do haggis and a venison burger.

The campsite runs a small shop that is a resupply point rather than a grocer's: freeze-dried meals, home baking, energy bars, plasters, socks and midge spray. There is a camping kitchen, hot showers, laundry and a drying area, which tells you what kind of guest the place is used to.

The Way into Glen Falloch

Walkers on the West Highland Way pass straight through Inverarnan. Arriving from Rowardennan is a fourteen-mile day down the east shore of Loch Lomond, rocky and slow north of Inversnaid, and the burn crossings can become impassable after heavy rain. Heading on to Tyndrum is 12 miles, initially following the River Falloch, with much of the route on an old military road. Off the A82 to the north is the Falls of Falloch, a thirty-foot waterfall with a steel-mesh viewpoint by the architect John Kennedy called Woven Sound, which amplifies the water and carries lines from Dorothy Wordsworth's diary. "You're entering true Highlands country here," the travel writer Sophie Pither wrote of the walk north from the village.

When steamers reached Inverarnan

Steamers used to reach here. The Waterwitch began sailing up the Falloch in 1844 into a purpose-built canal and turning basin, backed by the Marquis of Breadalbane for the onward coaches to Killin and Fort William. When the railway reached Tyndrum in 1873 the coaches moved down to Ardlui and Inverarnan stopped being an interchange.

Arriving by rail, road or foot

Ardlui station, unstaffed and about 1.8 miles south, is still the nearest stop on the West Highland Line, and the A82 buses between Glasgow, Oban and Fort William pull in by the hotel. Many visitors are walkers, arriving on foot and leaving the same way, boots drying by the fire while the rain carries on outside.