Lochearnhead

Lochside Food and the Lost Shop

At The Clachan Hotel, the bar looks across Loch Earn to Edinample Castle, a late sixteenth-century tower house on the far shore. The hotel occupies a lochside row of whitewashed cottages. Its seasonal menus have included beer-battered haddock, steak and Guinness pie, Campbell's haggis with neeps, tatties and whisky cream, three-cheese macaroni, Highlander chicken stuffed with haggis, and beer-battered halloumi. The bar has offered a changing cask beer in summer, often from Belhaven. The restaurant can prepare a packed lunch.

There are no shops in Lochearnhead. The last one, a post office and store built around 1870, closed around 2023 and is now a house called Taigh Na Bhuth; by the 1970s its front garden had spent time as an Esso forecourt. Provisions are available in Killin, a fourteen-minute drive, or in Callander farther south.

Water, Railways and Hill Paths

The village sits where the A84 meets the A85, at the western end of the loch and the foot of Glen Ogle, with the Breadalbane hills rising behind. Loch Earn has a seiche, a wind-driven tide of sorts that lifts the water at one end. Beside the village's lochside hotel, Loch Earn Wakeschool runs coached wakeboarding, wakesurfing and waterskiing, along with ringo rides, scenic boat trips, and self-hire paddleboards and kayaks.

Walking is the main draw here. The Glen Ogle Trail is a six-and-a-half-mile circuit that climbs steeply to a dismantled railway, follows a good cycle path to the Glen Ogle Viaduct and looks back down over the village, with autumn colour along the old line. The return, near the military road, is boggy and overgrown enough that retracing the railway is the easier option. This is the ground where, in 2004, landslides trapped fifty-seven motorists between two slips; everyone was airlifted out over three hours and no one was hurt. The long-distance Rob Roy Way passes through on its way from Drymen to Pitlochry, and National Cycle Route 7 shares the old railway line. South of the loch, Ben Vorlich rises to a pyramid point at 985 metres, usually climbed from Ardvorlich rather than from here.

Inside St Angus's Church

St Angus's Episcopal Church, built around 1885 in plain Gothic, has a deliberately top-heavy belfry and a bell cast in Dublin in 1890. Inside are clear leaded windows with coloured margins, an east window remembering Rear Admiral Malcolm MacGregor, and a painted and gilded reredos showing Saints Ninian, Columba, Blane and Angus.

Highland Games

The Balquhidder, Lochearnhead and Strathyre Highland Games were revived by Ewen Cameron, a six-foot-five, twenty-two-stone hotelier who once won more than a hundred first prizes in a single season and took his caber to perform before thirty thousand people in Denmark. The Ewen Cameron Cup honours the best all-round thrower of ball, hammer and caber.

Killin, Balquhidder and the Wider Base

Lochearnhead is a base for walks and short drives. In Killin, the River Dochart spreads into broad rocky rapids beneath the bridge. West of the A84, Rob Roy MacGregor’s grave is in Balquhidder kirkyard; he died at Inverlochlarig Beg farther up the glen in 1734.