On the Bonnie, Bonnie Banks

“By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes, Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond, Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae, On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond.”

This Scottish anthem, supposedly a Jacobite reworking of an earlier song, which is still sung with gusto at many a gathering and gig, does little to dampen the romance of Loch Lomond, and nor should it.

Loch Lomond and its surrounds, which were packaged together as Scotland’s first national park 20 years ago, is an epic landscape, where the Lowlands meet the Highlands. It’s a place of icy-blue waters, fringed with lush forests and wooded glens and guarded by mighty mountains – not least Ben Lomond, the most southerly of all of Scotland’s munros.

I’ve driven the A82, the road that snakes round its western shores, more times than I