DISCOVER The Trossachs
Are three: boots, beer, big views. The quest for happiness is at an end: we found it – on the best pub walk in every national park.
DO YOU EVER get the feeling when you’re walking ‘Oh I could just keep doing this forever’? And have you considered, as you heft the first post-walk drink to your lips and swallow, that the human body doesn’t contain much greater capacity for pleasure than this? Walkers are great simplifiers of life. When you’re walking you’re treading a narrow path through the infinite thicket of complexity that life comprises and arriving at a kind of wisdom. This – being alive, being here, being you – is rather good.
The world looks beautiful from here.
And won’t a quenching well-earned pint be just a wonderful usher into an evening of rest, repast and reflection?
Such glimpses of perfect contentment are precious and privileged, but they’re afforded to walkers routinely. Money might not grow on trees, but happiness seems to –and on hillsides, along riverbanks and old railway lines, beyond dunes and in the lee of drystone walls, among a thousand other places. It’s a contentment perfectly complemented by a well-placed pub – that developing-room for happy memories, that cradle of conviviality. Put the walk and the pub together in a national park and your chances of raising pleasure to its highest pitch – simplicity to an ecstatic singularity – rise dramatically. It’s almost cheating. But no quest is worthier, so we went in search –and the first place we found it was in Scotland.
Loch Lomond &The Trossachs is Scotland’s southernmost national park, and among the younger intake nationally –coming more than half a century after the Peak District and Lake District. But though it was only instituted in 2002, it’s long been the focus of discerning tourists’ attention. In fact The Trossachs were ‘discovered’ as a romantic destination at the same time as the Lake District, the Wordsworths visiting seven years before Sir Walter Scott’s best-selling narrative poem of 1810, The Lady of the Lake – set here in the woody, wild landscape around Loch Katrine – brought the area to a wide audience. (It’s hard today to appreciate just how big an impact Scott’s 200-page poemnovel had – but it was the world’s first international blockbuster, a publishing sensation that made it the Harry Potter of its day.)
The area became the next port of call for tourists giddied by the sublimity of the Lakes and hungry for a ne
