Inversnaid

The falls at the road's end

The Arklet Burn drops off the hillside and into Loch Lomond right beside the hotel, and a short path takes you to a footbridge over the pool below the cascade. This is Inversnaid Falls, or Eas Inbhir Snàthaid, the mouth of the needle-like stream. It is a principal attraction, a very short walk from where the road runs out.

The road runs out because there is almost nowhere further to go. Inversnaid sits on the remote east shore of Loch Lomond, at the end of a single-track lane. To drive here you take the B829 from Aberfoyle, twelve miles of narrow tarmac past Loch Ard, Loch Chon and the reservoir at Loch Arklet, where osprey and feral goats turn up. The whole journey is about fifteen miles. Most walkers arrive instead by water: Cruise Loch Lomond runs a thirty-minute waterbus from Tarbet on the far shore between late March and the start of November, and dogs travel free.

Two lochside places to eat

There are two places to eat and drink, and both stand within sight of the loch. The Inversnaid Hotel is the large lochside building, a coaching hotel with a lounge bar and an open log fire in reception. The Duke of Montrose commissioned it in 1820 as a hunting lodge, and it quickly became a staging post on a circuit that combined train, steamer and horse-drawn coach; at the Victorian peak the steamers called as often as five times a day.

The other option is the Inversnaid Bunkhouse, which occupies a former church and keeps its original stained glass. Mark and Doda Whittaker run it, and the kitchen upstairs is the Top Bunk Bistro. The food leans Scottish and locally sourced: haggis with tattie scones and whisky sauce, rarebit with red-onion marmalade, venison stew with juniper-and-thyme dumplings, a chilli-honey fried-chicken burger, a South Indian chilli-and-garlic curry, sticky toffee pudding to finish. Breakfast is porridge or continental, and they will make up a packed lunch. Non-residents can ask about an evening table on the day.

Walking into woodland and rock

For walking, the Arklet Trail is the short one: a mile and a half from the hotel car park, steep in places, climbing through woodland beside the gorge with views back across the loch, done in an hour or so. The West Highland Way passes straight through, crossing the waterfall by footbridge; head north from here and the lochside path turns genuinely rough, all crags and boulders. Inland, the Old Military Road climbs sharply to the ruined garrison and the RSPB reserve, then runs on beside Loch Arklet to Stronachlachar Pier. The reserve is free, more than eight hundred hectares of Atlantic oak woodland the RSPB calls temperate rainforest, carpeted with bluebells in spring.

The garrison and Rob Roy

The garrison itself is the story that draws people uphill. It was built in 1718-19 as part of the government response to the 1715 Jacobite rising, watching two fords on a Highland route, and its position may have had something to do with keeping an eye on Rob Roy MacGregor, who had made his home here with Mary MacGregor after they married in 1693. What survives is a roofless sheep-fank and a barn at Garrison Farm.

Poets and the former school

Wordsworth walked here in 1803 and met his Highland Girl; Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote the place a poem in 1881 and ended it, "Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet." The village school closed years ago, when the roll had fallen to two pupils.