Walking Loch Lomond and the Trossachs. Ronald Turnbull

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      INTRODUCTION

The High Road and the Low

      Loch Lomond and the Trossachs are the beginning of the big hills of the Scottish Highlands. And given that they stand in the front doorway, it's only right that they are the friendly and welcoming ones. Instead of huge crags and airy, scary ridges, here are small paths that weave uphill among boulders and little lumpy outcrops. The Munros (3000ft or 914m mountains) are not easy anywhere, but here in the south they are that little bit less serious.

      So it makes sense that these hills, first in geography for those approaching from the cities of the south, are also, for many Scottish hill-goers, first in time. The Munro tick-list will often start off on the most southerly of them all, Ben Lomond. Rowardennan car park is large, and has a handy shelter hut. Ben Lomond's path is as wide, and as well used, as a town shopping street – but a lot more sociable and friendly. Chaps with chainsaws have cleared the gloomy spruce from the lower slopes, so straight away you see the spreading waters of Loch Lomond and feel the cool mountain air. The path will offer views of the much-sung loch all the way up – at least, until the cloud closes in. And across the otherwise gentle slope runs one small crag, as a first footfall on the crinkly grey mountain rock. It's the schist of the southern Highlands, wrinkled like the hide of an elderly rhinoceros, and like that rhinoceros friendly on the whole but with the occasional nasty moment. Unlike the rhino, the grey schist breaks down into a fertile soil that gives lots of grass, a sprinkling of tormentil and bedstraw, and in special lime-rich corners the tiny gardens of alpine rarities.

      Nobody, we suppose, would clamber over a rhino, however elderly. And the schist, slippery when wet and well endowed with wild flowers and other green shaggy matter, tends also to form knobs and excrescences rather than high crags. It is not great for scrambling or climbs – the Cobbler, with its fine routes and rock-tower top, is an atypical oddity. Otherwise there's a loose ridgeline on Ben Lui, some scrappy crag on Beinn a' Chroin, and small unserious scrambly moments almost anywhere.

      But the walker attempting that first-ever Munro is probably quite pleased about the lack of scrambling on Ben Lomond. As you emerge at the kissing gate onto the open hill, the loch spreads ever wider, with islands casually flung about in it by a preoccupied glacier. One of the little ferryboats chugs along the shoreline, its passengers well waterproofed and hunched under the drizzle. Or it's a different day and they're wondering why the sunshine isn't also warm, as the breeze of the boat's passage flutters their T-shirts.