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 Callander Town Centre |
Callander lies 14 miles north west of Stirling on the A84, and forms a key gateway to the Highlands. Here the fertile plains come to an end, and the mountains begin. Here you leave behind you the link to the motorway network of the central belt, and begin to look ahead to Ben Ledi and the road that will take you to Crianlarich, Fort William and beyond. For many visitors the "real" Scotland starts here.
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Callander's attraction to visitors goes back a long way. The Romans named this place Bochastle when they built a fort beside the River Teith here in the first century AD. Today this episode in Callander's history is marked primarily though the name of the Roman Camp Hotel, near the eastern end of the town.
 The Crown Hotel |
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The next notable development was also military. This was the road built through the area by Caulfeild in 1743 as part of the network intended to allow pacification of the Highlands in the aftermath of the 1715 Jacobite uprising. In practice this network was mostly of use in assisting the 1745 uprising.
By 1790 visitors to Callander were proving important enough to the economy for the local minister, James Robertson, to produce one of Scotland's first tourist guides: A Pamphlet Descriptive of the Neighbourhood of Callander. The real growth came twenty years later, however, with the publication of The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott. This placed the Trossachs very firmly on the tourist trail, and Callander became the main gateway to the area.
The Trossachs are often painted as a "Scotland in miniature", an area of lower mountains and lakes extending west and south from Callander to Aberfoyle, and interestingly reminiscent of the English Lake District, which was also seeing a tourist boom at around the same time. Whether the Trossachs would have achieved their fame without the influence of Sir Walter Scott is debatable. For some they are just the foothills of the real Highlands: for others they remain the most attractive part of Scotland.
The coming of the railway in the 1860s confirmed Callander's status as a tourist destination, though it took a further 20 years for the Callander & Oban Railway to reach Oban. This all stopped with Beeching's railway cuts of 1965, and since then the nearest railway stations have been at Stirling or Crianlarich.
Today's Callander is a bustling, sometimes crowded town. At its centre is the Rob Roy and Trossachs Visitor Centre, which housed the Tourist Information Centre, in a converted church just off Main Street. The Rob Roy connection is celebrated by the 79 mile Rob Roy Way which passes through Callander on its route from Drymen to Pitlochry.
Even when it's busy, however, it is possible to get away from Callander's main street to see a quieter aspect of the town. Parallel to the main street and a little to the south is the lovely River Teith: while to the north lie Callander Crags. Callander really does repay a little exploration.
