Loch Lomond and The Trossachs
Scotland's first national park — the Highland Boundary Fault drawn across open water in a line of oak-wooded islands, lowland at the foot of the loch and Munro country at its head.
When the National Parks (Scotland) Act finally arrived in 2000 — half a century after England's — this is where it was spent first. The park created in 2002 wraps Loch Lomond, the Trossachs glens, Breadalbane and the Argyll Forest into one boundary around the country's great geological seam: the Highland Boundary Fault crosses the park diagonally, and nowhere is it more legible. From Conic Hill above Balmaha the fault runs on across the water as a stepping-stone line of islands — Inchcailloch, Torrinch, Creinch, Inchmurrin — with farmland flat to the south-east and the Highlands piling up beyond. Loch Lomond itself is the largest expanse of fresh water in Great Britain, thirty-odd islands scattered down its wide southern half, and Ben Lomond on the eastern shore is the most southerly Munro — the mountain Glasgow grew up looking at.
The Trossachs, the wooded knot of glens and small lochs east of the fault, is where Scottish tourism was invented. Walter Scott set The Lady of the Lake on Loch Katrine in 1810 and the coach parties arrived within the season; the steamship Sir Walter Scott, launched on Katrine in 1900, is sailing still. The loch has a second, stranger distinction: since 1859 it has supplied Glasgow's drinking water by gravity through Victorian aqueducts, which is why its shores remain roadless and its water famously soft. This is also Rob Roy MacGregor's country — born at Glen Gyle at Katrine's head, buried in the small yard at Balquhidder — and the West Highland Way threads the park along Loch Lomond's roadless east shore.
The nature is Atlantic and particular. The east-shore oakwoods are temperate rainforest, filmy-ferned and bluebelled in May, and the loch keeps relics found almost nowhere else in Britain: the powan, a whitefish marooned here since the ice, and the Loch Lomond dock, a plant whose entire British range hugs these shores. A feral colony of red-necked wallabies has, improbably, held the island of Inchconnachan since the 1940s. West of the loch rise the Arrochar Alps at the head of Loch Long — The Cobbler's rock prow among them, the founding crag of Glasgow's climbing tradition — and Breadalbane fills the park's north with proper Munro country around Crianlarich and Tyndrum: Ben More, Ben Lui and their neighbours.
What's worth knowing before you go
Access is the park's blessing and its burden: it lies within an hour of most of Scotland's population. Balloch, at the foot of the loch, has direct trains from central Glasgow; the West Highland Line stops at Arrochar & Tarbet and Ardlui on the west side; Callander and Aberfoyle, the Trossachs gateways, are reached by bus from Stirling. Summer weekends on the A82 and at Balmaha are exactly what the arithmetic implies — go midweek, or in May and late September when the oakwoods are at their best. Note the east-shore camping byelaws: from March to September the loch-shore management zones require a cheap permit, the legacy of loving the place nearly to death. Midges run May to September. The connoisseur's move is to climb Conic Hill from Balmaha early on a clear morning and read the fault-line islands stepping across the loch — then take the little ferry to Inchcailloch and stand on one.