It was a bright, beautiful cool morning when we woke up in Drymen. My weather app said it was a brisk 46 degrees, but when I considered how hot and dry things are in Southern Oregon, I felt very grateful to be in Scotland. We had breakfast and packed up. Before we left, we took pictures of our hotel
and the pub where we had had dinner last night.
We then set forth to explore a little of the surrounding area. Drymen is at the edge of Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park. Like Adirondack Park in New York, much of the land here is in private hands and there are farms and hamlets mixed in with the forest and lake areas. It is not a particularly dramatic landscape. When we ate last night at The Clachan, we talked with a young couple from Cumbria who had been up camping in the Trossachs. I asked her about her experience. "It's okay, I guess," she replied. "Not that much to see." Perhaps she was spoiled living so close to the Lake District and the Yorkshire Moors. I found the scenery quite enjoyable as we drove through it, though I certainly would not call any of it breathtaking.
We detoured to see the most famous place in The Trossachs, Lake Katrine. Despite the prominence given to this loch in the travel literature, it is not easy to get there. I had to drive down and back a poorly paved single lane road. There were not enough places to pull over when I car came from the other direction and at one point I was afraid we would just get stuck there in a ditch at the side of the . Need I mention that there was NO cell service?
Lake Katrine - there are different theories about why it is call a lake rather than a loch - is important for a couple reasons. Walter Scott traveled here in 1810 and was so taken by its wild, natural beauty that he wrote his narrative poem The Lady of the Lake here. I was taken with all the heather on the hilltops, but basically I was a little befuddled by how this body of water and the poem started tourism in the Highlands.
But rather like Hetch Hetchy, others saw wasted water where Scott saw a mysterious spirit in the depths. So for the past 150 years Lake Katrine has also been the City of Glasgow's municipal water supply. Not everyone was thrilled with the change. When the first water came piped in from the Trossachs to the city, a Glaswegian, accustomed to the brownish well water, supposedly exclaimed, "It's got nae color, nae taste - it's nae good!"
We drove on. The scenery suddenly became extremely dramatic.
This is both Scotland's most famous scenic area and the scene of its most famous massacre. It was here that the royal army, led by a Campbell, slaughtered men, women, and children of the MacDonald clan. Many of those who fled from the soldiers died in the winter snows in these mountains. For most Scots it is hard to separate the scenery from the savagery, no matter how bucolic it seems.
Today is part of the August Bank Holiday weekend, so it was it was hard to get a place to stay. I did find a bed and breakfast just outside of Glencoe. It only has two rooms, and I immediately had the sense of staying with a maiden aunt. But it was located in a beautiful area.
