We were filming a walk for my slot on the BBC’s The Adventure Show and, as in all these walks, it’s important to set the scene, to show the viewer where we are and say where we’re going. To do this I had chosen a lovely spot near the foot of the Ledard Burn, which tumbles down from Ben Venue in the Trossachs. The burn passes the very old Ledard Farm and I was aware that Sir Walter Scott had once stayed there to while working on the notes for his books, The Lady of the Lake, Rob Roy and Waverley. It was said that he worked by a pool on the Ledard Burn near the farm, nowadays known as Scott’s Pool.

Above Scott’s Pool and a tumbling waterfall lies another pool, overhung with oak and birch and framed by steep slopes of bracken. This is Helen’s Pool, where Rob Roy Macgregor courted his wife, Helen Campbell. It is a rather romantic spot in a romantic corner of Scotland.

Less than 20 miles from Glasgow it’s easy to discount the Trossachs as daytripper country, and I guess Sir Walter Scott overly romanticised it but up until the Jacobite uprisings this tumbled land of rocky bluffs and lochs, mountain and wild glens were virtually sequestered from the laws of the land. The clansmen who lived here were beyond the law and lived to an older system of self regulation and family loyalty.

A few lines in an old Statistical Account of the times suggests they were prone to regular “predatory excursions” on their neighbours in the south, usually on cattle raiding ploys. It wasn’t until after Culloden that the area began to open up, with artists and writers and poets leading the invasion.

It’s worth reading Scott’s Rob Roy and Lady of the Lake and it was good, later in the day, to sit near the summit of Ben Venue and gaze down on Loch Katrine beyond the Bealach nam Bo, where, it is claimed, the Macgregors once drove their stolen cattle back to their homelands at the head of Loch Katrine. Beyond the pass lies the Corrie of the Urisks, or Goblins and beyond that, in the loch, lies Ellen’s Isle, or Eilean Molach, the setting for Roderick Dhu’s stronghold. In the Lady of the Lake, Helen Douglas, the heroine, and her father escape from the island and hide in the Goblin’s corrie.

And beyond the literary and historic connections lie the hills - silent and enduring. Ben More and Stobinion, An Caisteal and Cruach Ardrain and Stob a’ Choin above Inverlochlarig, once the home of Rob Roy himself. 

It’s easy to overlook the Trossachs and head for the bigger hills of the north, but there is definitely an intimacy about these hills and glens as though all the great features of the highlands have been compressed into one small area. And curiously, I would suggest that the pen portraits that Scott painted of the Trossachs soon become generic of the highlands as a whole. Well worth a visit!

The image is of the islands of Loch Katrine from Ben Venue.

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