Ross McDowell / Tartan Compass
Loch Katrine is a Highland landscape still very much in use, with boats on the water, cyclists and walkers around its shores, and an extraordinary continuing connection with Glasgow.
Boat travel has been part of Loch Katrine's visitor story for generations, while cycling and walking now bring people into the landscape at a different pace. The loch feels recreational and sociable rather than remote from everyday life. Its most important modern function is much less visible. Glasgow has drawn water from Loch Katrine since 1859 through one of Scotland's great engineering schemes, and the system continues to serve more than a million people. Tourism, engineering and landscape overlap neatly here. Walter Scott helped change how visitors imagined the Trossachs, but beneath that cultural story is a loch still performing an essential job for the modern city.
Watch how people occupy the landscape. Boats move across the water while walkers and cyclists appear around the shore, giving the loch an active character that a still photograph can miss. Then consider what cannot be seen. The water itself connects this Highland landscape directly with homes and businesses many miles away in Greater Glasgow.
Loch Katrine is one of those places where I am always struck by how quickly the central belt gives way to something that feels much more Highland. Mountains, water and boats do most of the work. You arrive and the change of landscape is immediately obvious.
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