At the Garden Restaurant, part of the Macdonald Forest Hills Hotel, dinner comes with Loch Ard and the Trossachs framed in the windows and modern Scottish food on the plate: sole with samphire and cherry tomatoes, lemon posset with strawberries and shortbread. Book ahead for the evening. The hotel stands on the site of Dalveagh, a house sold in 1937 and turned into what became Forest Hills. Its other room, Rafters Bar & Bistro, does afternoon tea, Sunday lunch and coffee, but opens seasonally, so check before you count on it.
Kinlochard is a small hamlet at the head of Loch Ard, four miles west of Aberfoyle along the B829, with water in front of it, forested hillsides around it and Ben Lomond standing beyond. It was a forestry village; its former school and shop have closed, along with the Wee Blether Tea Room, whose outdoor tables once looked over the loch and whose soup, baked potatoes and toasties are no longer served. For food and supplies now, it is the four-mile drive back east to Aberfoyle.
What the village has instead is water, hills and paths. The Kinlochard and the Crannog circuit is a twelve-kilometre loop on forestry tracks past Couligarten Bay and an Iron Age crannog, an artificial island set in the loch, with Ben Lomond in the distance. The Loch Ard Sculpture Trail is shorter, about 6.7 kilometres, and passes mirrored eagles, foxes and red squirrels; families manage it, though there are muddy and steep stretches. For a hard day, Ben Venue climbs from Ledard Farm through a wooded glen and a waterfall to a rocky ridge above Loch Katrine, 812 metres of ascent across five to six hours.
On the loch itself, Loch Ard Adventure hires kayaks and runs paddleboarding and canoeing. The sailing club sits on the freshwater loch that is the source of the River Forth; Shirley Robertson, twice an Olympic sailing gold medallist, learned here. Wild swimming and fishing happen too. There is a play park, a village hall and a lochside field.
The Ledard waterfall drew Sir Walter Scott, who put it into Waverley and Rob Roy and wrote of the scenery, "I never saw any thing which I admired so much." Wordsworth and Hazlitt came as well.
Much of Disney's Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue was filmed around here in 1953, with local forestry workers cast as clansmen and beekeepers' smokers producing artificial Highland mist. The funeral barge from the film was afterwards sunk in Kinlochard Bay.
On a rocky islet near the loch's south shore stands Duke Murdoch's Castle, the ruin of a fortified tower possibly 14th-century, a rubble rectangle about fourteen metres by six, its tallest surviving wall around three metres high. In the war an armed launch patrolled Loch Ard against seaplanes and the district held an ammunition dump in Nissen huts spaced out towards Loch Chon.
Getting here rewards a little planning. Stirling, twenty miles east, is the practical rail and bus hub; past Aberfoyle the road narrows, mobile coverage fades, and the forest car park holds eight to ten cars. The weekday C61 bus into the village runs on demand and must be booked by three the previous afternoon.
Ian McDonald, who grew up in Kinlochard in the 1950s, said he would still choose that childhood over any other. At night the skies here go properly dark, and the loch goes quiet.