Dead end scones

This is a real dead-end kind of place. But only because it is at the end of a dead-end road! To be precise it is not quite at the end of the road because you can go on a few miles to Stronachlachar and Inversnaid but you have no choice but to come back the same way. Having said that, Rob Roy, whose country this is, probably had a hundred ways in and out of Kinlochard. He wasn’t driving a car though. Staying in the village for a few days, courtesy of our intrepid and generous Trossachs correspondents, afforded us a chance to explore the local scone scene. Previously we have reported on one of our favourite places, the Wee Blether in the centre of the village. But there are scones everywhere in the Trossachs.

Forest Hills Hotel

The Forest Hills Hotel was just along the road and seemed like a good place to start. It holds a particularly fond memory for me from almost forty years ago. I was the official photographer at a family wedding. At one point I remember assembling the bride and groom and both sets of parents in front of a fireplace for a group shot. The hotel has undergone massive changes since then and I wondered if the fireplace had survived almost four decades of modernisation and change. It had, and still stands proud, pretty much as I remembered it. In fact the main part of the hotel was remarkably unchanged.

How many scones do you need?

Forty years ago we were sipping champagne which had been transported in suitcases all the way from France, but this time, of course, we were on scone safari. Pat just wanted a cup of tea so it was up to me to order a scone for myself. Turned out they came in twos (one plain, one fruit) but something was obviously lost in translation because when they arrived there was two for Pat as well! Heyho, she scoffed them anyway, no problem! Three different jams as well as a generous bowl of cream and the scones themselves were just the way we like them … warm, not too big, slightly crunchy on the outside and beautifully soft and light inside… mmmmm, topscone!

Nowadays the hotel has all the necessary accoutrements to make it into a ‘spa’ resort. It is slightly ironic, however, to see lots of people pounding treadmills in a hot sweaty gym when they are surrounded by beautiful countryside and hills where they could be getting much better exercise whilst breathing pure clear Trossachs air. What is that all about?

Is the UK a sporting powerhouse

Perhaps, more to the point at this particular time, what are the Olympics all about? Once a noble amateur sporting spectacle, in recent years it has succumbed to the powers of capitalism. Its lost it’s moral compass. Too much flag waving by multi-millionaires and pontificating by knights of the realm! The world would be a much better place if there was no professionalism in sport. Can’t think of a single good thing to come from it. If Team GB does well there will be calls for vast amounts of money to be invested to maintain our place in the world as a great sporting powerhouse. If it does badly there will be calls for vast amounts of money to be invested to transform us into a great sporting powerhouse. As if it matters? Never mind Russia’s drug taking, financial and medical advantages over others are just another form of cheating!

The fact that we might beat Team Vanuatu in the hop, skip and jump is supremely irrelevant to almost everything that really matters. It’s all a grotesque nonsense and a waste of money.

On top of all that we are expected to listen to endless banal drivel from multi-millionaire commentators and pundits. Olympic tennis turns out to be a rerun of Wimbledon? Olympic golf … we despair! The sooner they have ordinary dads building an IKEA Billy bookcase as an Olympic event the better. Rant over, must get back to the scones, they’re very good … gold medal even.

FK8 3TL         tel: 0344 879 9057          Forest Hills Hotel