“You want me to drive how far today?”  -Mike

For our third day, I had planned a very ambitious driving tour, but after realizing how long it took for us to get to St. Andrews and back – today’s driving route had to be severely downsized.  We ended up visiting just two places -the locations on my list closest to Stirling -and even that took most of the day.

Our first stop was a village called Luss, located about 50 miles away on the shore of Loch Lomond.  

Luss is a traditional Scottish village, now designated as a “conservation village”.  That means that pretty much everything in the village is protected.  No changes can be made without permission.

For nearly 25 years, Luss was used as a filming site for a popular Scottish TV drama and as a result, the village gets up to 750,000 tourists a year.  That has to be quite overwhelming for a village with only about 450 residents..

Since it is a frequent tour-bus stop, there is a big parking lot on the outskirts of the village, along with a gift shop and restrooms.  

Along the road that leads to the pier at the Loch were five or six identical cottages in a row.  They were built in the mid 1800’s to house workers from nearby slate quarries.

They had cute little doors.

On one hand I assumed that since Luss is such a huge stop with the tour buses that the town would play it up… but most of the cottages that had any bit of yard to them had let their shrubs grow to well over 6 feet and you couldn’t see anything but hedges as you walked down the road.  I can’t blame them, considering all the visitors they get.

This is a random street view and you can see how the houses are hidden by shrubs.

I was able to get one picture looking through a front gate –

We went to take a look at the Loch.  The town has a dock where boats depart for tours of the loch.

We walked along the shore.

Mike spotted a Loch “monster” (close to shore in the middle right area of this picture) as we walked along the water -he’s hoping his picture goes viral… ha ha. 

There was a lovely old church waiting for us at the end of the waterfront path.  The present church was built in 1875 and is quite popular for weddings.  Local history says that Christianity arrived in Luss as early as the 500’s.  There are some very old relics from hundreds of years ago in the churchyard, The earliest are from the 700’s and there’s even a Viking grave from the 11th century.

As you can imagine, Luss didn’t take too long to explore.  It was cute, but I have to think that its popularity is mostly the result of fans of the TV show wanting to see it in person -which I get having just visited Midhope Castle for the same reason.

Our second stop got upgraded from the “If we have time” section of my over-achiever driving tour to the “I guess we have time now” section of the driving tour.  We circled back around to Castle Doune, which isn’t too far from Stirling.

Castle Doune is a triple threat filming location site: Quite a few scenes from Monty Python’s Holy Grail were filmed there, including the famous flying cow scene. Since this year is the 50th anniversary of the movie, it seems fitting we visited.

In a nod to Monty Python, the souvenir shop sells coconut shells.

Doune Castle has also appeared as “Winterfell” in the Game of Thrones, and as Castle Leoch, (the seat of Clan Mackenzie) in Outlander.

While somewhat worse for wear, it was actually fun to see and it does have a royal history. It was the home of the Duke of Albany. He got the castle in 1361 by marrying the Countess of Menteith. The Duke was the younger brother of King Robert III, who was politically weak and physically infirm. The Duke was effectively the ruler of Scotland between1386-1420 (the year of his death). Doune Castle was used as a Royal retreat and hunting lodge during those years.  Doune’s use as a royal retreat ended in 1603 when James VI of Scotland ascended the English throne as James I.

There is a bit of mystery about the castle as it stands now. Based on research and clues in the building itself, they think it might have been much larger than it is now, but there are no records to confirm this. 

There is ongoing work being done on the castle structure, and the interior is mostly bare, but still interesting.

I don’t get tired of using Mike’s height to show how small the inner doors are at many historic sites.

After we left Doune, we went straight back to Stirling to return the car. The car rental place offered us a ride back as far as the train station, which was happily accepted since the train station was very close to our hotel.

Categories: Scotland -2025, Stirling -Day 3