Lochearnhead

Lochside Food and the Lost Shop

The bar of the Clachan Cottage Hotel looks straight across Loch Earn to Edinample Castle, a late sixteenth-century tower house on the far shore. The hotel itself is a lochside row of whitewashed cottages, and the kitchen leans on Highland staples done properly: beer-battered haddock, steak and Guinness pie, Campbell's haggis with neeps, tatties and a whisky cream, three-cheese macaroni, and a Highlander chicken stuffed with more haggis. Vegetarians get beer-battered halloumi. In summer there is usually a single changing cask beer, most often something from Belhaven. The restaurant will make up a packed lunch, which is worth arranging, since there are no food shops in the village.

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

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 Clachan, 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.

Station Life and Highland Games

The old railway station has had the longer afterlife. Opened in 1904 to move Perthshire sheep, closed in 1951, it became a Scout centre in 1962 and remains one; its restored platform canopy won a national railway heritage award in 2019. The village also keeps the Balquhidder, Lochearnhead and Strathyre Highland Games, 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 a crowd of thirty thousand in Denmark.

Killin, Balquhidder and the Wider Base

For a base, this is a place to walk from and come back to. If you drive fourteen minutes to Killin the River Dochart spreads into broad rocky rapids under the bridge, and just west of the A84 at Balquhidder, Rob Roy MacGregor lies in the kirkyard, a short way from Inverlochlarig Beg, where he actually died. The Ewen Cameron Cup still goes to the best all-round thrower of ball, hammer and caber each summer, in a village that has kept the man's name long after it lost its shop.