A commercial art gallery with four showrooms sits beside the road here. Inverbeg Galleries is run by the Scottish artist John M Boyd, and its rooms change constantly: landscapes and seascapes, wildlife, aviation, cityscapes, paddle steamers and ocean liners, alongside prints, artists' supplies and a framing service.
Next door is the reason most people stop. The Inn on Loch Lomond stands on the western shore looking east across the water to Ben Lomond, and inside it has been fitted out with a hand-finished elm bar, an oak mantelpiece and a good deal of leather and cowhide. The restaurant is relaxed rather than formal, and at weekends there is live folk music. The kitchen leans Scottish without making a performance of it: recent menus have included Cullen skink with smoked haddock and cream, black-pudding and haggis bonbons, moules mariniere, haggis, neeps and tatties with whisky sauce, a steak pie, mushroom pappardelle, and sticky toffee pudding served with tablet ice cream, with a plate of Arran cheddar and Scottish blue cheese to finish. One diner, Margaret W, wrote that the "food was top class and service was superb."
The bar keeps a range of real ales and a proper shelf of Loch Lomond whiskies — Inchmurrin, Inchmoan, the Single Grain and the 12 Year Old — plus the local Helles lager. Dogs are welcome in the restaurant and bar areas, and there is a grassed area and outdoor seating within the grounds.
The inn has worn several names. It traces its establishment to 1814, when it opened as a travellers' watering hole and was known first as the Ferry Inn and later the Inverbeg Inn; the present building is late Victorian. It passed through the MacFarlanes, the Robertsons and, from 1918, Miss Jessie Martin, and has been owned since 2023 by the Ryan family.
The ferry in that older name did real work. Drovers moving cattle from Argyll towards the Falkirk trysts used the crossing as a shortcut: the men went by boat while the cattle swam the loch from Inverbeg to Rowardennan, led across by experienced beasts kept in a field beside the ferry. The name itself is a small puzzle — "inver" means a river mouth, but there is no River Beg. What arrives here is the Douglas Water, coming down out of Glen Douglas.
For walking, the clearest option is the Firkin Point path, three miles of level surfaced track running north towards Tarbet close to the shore, with parking, a picnic area and toilets at the start; it is flat enough for prams and wheelchairs. Just south of the inn, Inverbeg Bridge carries a single stone arch over the Douglas Water and marks the boundary between the old parishes of Luss and Arrochar; a parapet stone records that it was built in 1762 and widened in 1914.
The A82 runs straight through, three miles north of Luss and five south of Tarbet, and Citylink's route 914, on the Glasgow to Fort William corridor, has a stop here signed "Inverbeg, at Hotel" — worth checking the timetable for your travel date. Luss, with its beach and pier, is a short drive south for anyone who wants a village with a centre. Inverbeg does not have one, and does not seem to miss it — a gallery, an inn, and the loch doing most of the talking.