Paradise Found
by Guy Procter

I am a nervous traveller. One of my travel paranoias is that the Scottish hate me for using their country like it's England's back garden. So it's rather disarming to be told I should treat a Scots back garden like it's England: "Ach, go outside with that thing will yeh? You're no on the Underground now". My B&B hostess gestured towards the back door and I skulked towards it, mobile phone pressed to my ear. They do hate us. Trust me to pick a dragon of a hostesses to stay with. It wasn't even my phone... Then she hooted "Go on with yeh! He was goin' too!" and, shaking her head, gestured for me to stay indoors. I had been the victim of a joke. A little newborn Highland tease had knocked me flying. Note to self: relax.

The truth is, here in the Trossachs I'm very, very welcome. In fact everyone's invited. Because Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, Scotland's two southernmost effusions of beauty, are jointly set to become the country's first National Park. Seems odd, doesn't it, to think that a country so rich in landscape, so flush with fells, so rolling in leafy lolly should not be ring-fenced at every turn with Lakelands, Snowdonias and Downses. But it ain't.

Scotland's up-hills and down-dales have been denied the incubator of legislation, and left to fend for themselves from the the day they were born to this. It comes down in part to a difference in national styles. Where the uptight English have always felt the need to nurture nature, and wrap a protective velvet cordon around our places of beauty, the Scots have never worried for their landscapes so. And the need for National Parks is after all less pressing when basically the whole nation is a park. (A report in 1945 recommended National Parks for Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, Glen Affric, Glen Cannich and Strathfarrar, Ben Nevis, Glencoe and Blackmount, the Cairngorms, Loch Torridon, Loch Maree and Loch Broom. And that leaves...?)

Since March this year, the National Parks (Scotland) Bill has been making its way through the Scottish Parliament. I won't pretend the 42 page report by the Rural Affairs Committee makes interesting reading, but there are glimmers. Among the list of eleven committee members debating National Park policy, for example, were a Mr Munro (high mountain specialist, no doubt), one Mr Lochhead (tireless in his work for large bodies of water) and the hairy-sounding Mike Rumbles (on hand should the debate turn nasty). More seriously, they're recommending an annual budget of around £2.5m - more than the Yorkshire Dales, a shade less than Snowdonia. Evidently, they mean business. Maybe a jewel in the Scotland's crown isn't the best choice of words, so try a Gucci on the wrist of the new, self-determining, self-confident Scotland.

On paper, then, the new park looks like this: a dog-leg running the length of Loch Lomond (just an hour north of Glasgow), then right over Ben Lomond (the most southerly 'Munro'. or Scottish mountain over 3,000ft) and Loch Katrine to Callander. But maps are just wrapping paper for the real deal -- those great nip-and-tuck trails, lonely blue lochs and plump hills that are only hinted at by their contour thumb-prints. With that in mind then, it seemed pressing to find out with what weapons the new £2.5m park is about to join the fight for your weekend dollar.

Callander looks like a town that expects. It's seen what's become of its peers in the Lake Disrict and can't wait. Not surprisingly, there's ample places to rest your head, after doing the opposite to your body. But a detailed inspection would have to wait for later. Our weekend's first appointment was in the Forest of Ard.

Forest riding is one of the things the Trossachs does best. There are thousands of acres to ride through, from barcode-regular pine plantations that strobe as you fly by on a well-made access track, to boss-eyed ancient oaks with witches'-finger routes to jink your front wheel over. The whole place is so well-upholstered with forest it's like a vision of Britain before all the trees were torn up to make Britannia rule the waves. We were pleased to find that here, then, the Trossachs is already exploiting one of its trump cards. Bikers are well catered for. There's an excellent bike shop and hire outfit at Trossachs Cycle Hire, near Gartmore on the A81. The shop is stocked with gleaming metal and the rental bikes are pretty tasty too. We went for full suspension jobbies, with half a mind on tricky tree routes and the other full of childlike glee at the idea of big red springs.

For someone used to riding a bike with a hard rear-end (that's the bike, not the rider) a full suspension model offers a realistic 'two flat tyres'-cum-clown-car experience. But as soon as we turned off the road onto one of the many signed forest tracks we were glad of them. Here was a descent that at 5mph would be interesting, 10mph technically tricky and 15mph? Grandmasters would flounder at the combinations of moves required to keep bike and rider together. I had envisaged a full-suspension set-up would see me gliding serenely over every rut, rock and furrow, glancing infrequently down like a conscientious limo driver to see my suspension engaged in frantic massage of the track below. Not so. In fact my bike felt like a mustang with a smacked backside. In the end, it was my colleague Emma who gave her steed its freedom first. I had arrived after the 10 minute descent at a small clearing in the woods. Turning to look for her while absently scratching forearms made itchy by vibration, I heard a sound like a sack of coal being delivered.

"Em...?" No response. "EM!" Perhaps a grunt. "Are you alright?" A sheepish noise of assent. We decided to knock the Indiana Jones trails on the head for the afternoon, and instead turned to the wide access tracks that wind changelessly throught the forest. Here you can make use of all your gears, for ascents that make your kneecaps pop off like jam-jar lids, to descents that leave a Dukes of Hazard dust trail behind you and bugs in your teeth.

The Forest of Ard is just one of several forest areas which together form the Queen Elizabeth Forest Park, an already-popular subset of what will be the National Park. There are 20,000 hectares to enjoy, and I think we saw most of them as we tried to make our way back to the village of Gartmore. Conifer forests have a weird hall-of-mirrors effect, which can see you arriving (how?) back where you were after a whole afternoon spent pedalling in the opposite direction. No doubt to a trained eye, the different species grown here (there are 17) would have given a clue. Even following the colour-coded route markers would have helped, but give a man a full suspension bike and he likes to explore.

It was midnight by the time we handed the bikes back in to the hire shop. Well, it was on my watch, after I'd tried to use it for a spot of Gentle Ben backwoodsmanship -- navigation using the sun. (You point 12 o'clock at the sun, then wind the big hand round to the time you got lost and... Doh!). In fact it wasn't that late. And what's more we'd blown the cobwebs from legs which just yesterday were trained like ivy round office chairs as if they'd never work again. We'd got the measure of the hairy heart of the Trossachs too.

But ask any American what a National Park needs to propel itself into the big league, and they'll tell you without hesitatin': some of those oh so purdy water features. That and an Edinburgh Woollen Mill shop, genetically charm-enhanced lambs and a job lot of 'Coaches Welcome' signs. Loch Katrine is the Trossachs' Ullswater. Twelve kilometres long, it is a loch which, in the disturbing language of the tourist brochures, extends a welcoming hand before deftly stealing your heart. That sounds like a news item in the Qatar Mirror to me, but I had to see this loch at whatever risks to my health. This, after all, was the lake that inspired Sir Walter Scott to write a poem I have never read: the Lady of the Lake. I have however admired it from afar.

I don't expect many of the people hovering at the pier had read it either. None of them were intoning it under their breath anyway. This is the bit where I'd usually say 'We hopped on our bikes and left the crowds behind. Yeeha!'. But this morning, we were going with the crowd of (yes) Americans, (yes) SAGA holidaymakers and assorted schoolchildren. That's because we were paid-up ticket holders for the (yes) SS Sir Walter Scott - the 140 year old steamer which runs from the Pier to the loch's far side at Stronachlachar. Our plan was to ride back round the loch's long side, on the waterboard's deserted access road.

The crossing on the ancient vessel was filled with a Gaelic brainwash courtesy of the -- dash it! Inescapable! -- tannoy. Moist-eyed fiddle-and-pan-pipe poured from the speakers as a soft-spoken gentleman intoned his mantra. The boat's massive steam engine for its part was as hushed as rewinding video recorder. I did pick up some interesting information as I leaned as though seasick over the side of the boat. Loch Katrine is the water source for Glasgow. Glasgow is 43 miles away. Having no major river flowing in or out, the water is extremely pure (please do not throw anything over the side). Down in the engine room the boilerman was listening to Oasis. At last we docked at Stronachlachar, and wheeled off our freshly-hired bikes. Twelve miles would see us back to the Pier, but we would do our best to make it last.

Again the dominant feature of the fore- and middle-ground here was trees: big, stretching oaks, each with its own subspecies of creeper creating a sense abundance like a rainforest. But here we also had views to many distant peaks, like the Lake District seen the through the wrong end of a telescope. The ride was sheer bliss. We lunched on the almost Balkan ruins of an old bridge, legs dangling over loch's tip, wavelets coming towards us rank upon rank as if gathering to listen to a story. Have you heard the one about Sir Walter Scott...?

With reflections of mountains all around, we didn't sit around for too long, and rejoined the road on its windy way around the shore. The vegetation is so lush you'd swear it rained more often than it... ah. Sleeves at first dotted and then shredded by rainfire we pulled over beneath the quivering canopy of a large tree. Bring me the head of Michael Fish, and a little tartare sauce. Soon though the sky cleared and our thighs were called upon to do the driving. Pretty soon we were caught in the tractor beam of a tea and cake at the Pier's café, and the last few miles were a blur of momentum-hoarding top-gear surges.

Before the last bubbles had disappeared from the brim of our teas we'd agreed: the Trossachs were a worthy addition to the poet-riddled list of Britain's most agreeable places. And there was so much we hadn't even touched on, including the matinée idol good looks of Loch Lomond. Still, you couldn't hope to do the Lake District in a day, and that was equally true of this National Park in waiting. If you've never thought of riding in Scotland, think of the Trossachs as a reducing-valve for the Highlands, a place where the hills are climable, the trails concentrated in a small area and many of the best views capturable in one awesome weekend.