Somehow I forgot to go snowboarding this winter, and consequently haven’t had much of a holiday for six months or so. The financial mugging meted out by the process of buying a flat put paid to a big old foreign jaunt and so I suggested that we make a modest start by going up north for the weekend, sparing the ozone layer the traditional long-haul battering and instead administering a gentle tickle via the Trøll. We booked a room at the Drovers’ Inn just north of Ardlui and headed off on Saturday morning.

I was looking forward to a robust drive along the scenic banks of Loch Lomond, but my hopes evaporated as the central belt receded in the mirrors. The A82, running up the west shore of the loch is quite tremendously odious. This main artery to Fort William is more of a varicose vein: it is exactly two car widths broad except from strategically placed bridges of wing mirror-threatening constriction and is surfaced with moon rock, craters and all. We trundled along behind drivers still reeling at the absence of a flag-bearing chap twenty yards ahead of one’s automobile, and overtook when it seemed least impolite. Rather less patient were a stream of heedless young GTI drivers who charged past at the first suggestion of a straight stretch of road, straight-pipe exhausts yowling the anguish of straining engines so that they reverberated across the loch.

The schizophrenic traffic and suspension-shattering road surface lasted all the way to the inn, where we pulled in at noon or so. This being an unseemly hour at which to hit the bar, we drove on to Killin for a coffee and a gentle wander around, pausing by the Falls of Dochart to eat our sweaty cheese sandwiches and strolling through the MacNab burial ground.

Still at a loose end and with an hour or two left to kill, Ash suggested we take a look at the Scottish Crannog Centre, round the eastern tip of Loch Tay. She and Maria and a bunch of other aquatic archaeology types spent a spring there a few years ago, lumbering around on the bottom in ill-fitting dry suits and worrying about antiquated air tanks. We parked, balked at the entry fee and promptly got back in the car with Ash reassuring me that crannogs aren’t all that exciting. I suspect some lingering resentment at having spent four weeks in a leaky rubber suit on a near-freezing loch in service to this place might have coloured her judgement.

Back at the inn we dumped our stuff in the room—the haunted room, no less—made our way to the bar and ordered some food. We took in our surroundings.

The inn is apparently 300 years old, and the entrance hall was populated with the spoils of three centuries of extraordinarily bloody hunting expeditions. A weasel stood stiffly in its case, lips curled back from gleaming fangs and a front paw clawing the air, slavering with diminutive post-mortem psychopathy. A shark snarled from a plaque behind the reception desk, snout wrinkled in anatomically implausible fury. King of the jungle was a rearing bear, claws intact and placed ready to poke the eyes out of drunken guests wobbling back to their rooms. Alone among the frozen carnage lay a docile two-headed lamb, which either died of or was killed due to its deformity.

Which was nice.

We had some food (plentiful but slightly dull) and found a seat by the fire crackling in a suspended grate. The bar was low-ceilinged and warm, and we sat back for a night of moderate boozing and chat with the other residents. A guitarist set up an amp and played away for most of the night to the unending joy of a hard core of pissed locals. I was gazing blankly across the room, the heat and the IPA threatening to overwhelm me when I noticed one of them, a middle-aged woman, precariously balanced on a pile of logs by the fireplace with a whisky and lemonade dangling from one hand and looking not so much the worse as the worst for wear.

As I watched, she toppled slowly and rigidly straight back into the chimney breast, tipping over the fireguard and ending up with her body pointing out into the room and her head directly beneath the fire basket.

“Holy shit,” I and a number of other onlookers declared simultaneously.

Ash spun round at the clang of the fireguard falling and immediately tried to haul the woman’s sack-of-potatoes dead weight out of the fireplace. She couldn’t shift her at all; I was still gaping uselessly at the situation, and the two guys nearest the fire lunged in to help drag her clear. The music eventually stopped and the stunned room looked on as a barmaid helped prop her up in a chair. The woman was unmarked, without even a speck of ash on her, and although she complained of a painful head she was at least talking and looking a damn sight more alert than she had five minutes previously.

“I think it’s time for you to get a taxi home,” the barmaid suggested as the rest of the room nodded in agreement. “Who’s with you tonight?”

There was some reticent discussion as to who this was while the barmaid moved away to find a phone. The woman sat still for a split second and then just keeled forward off her chair, landing spreadeagled on the floor in front of the bar. She was helped up and out of the room by the barmaid and another customer with the determined air of being disappeared, whereupon the music resumed and the atmosphere flooded back in with indecent haste.

We talked for a while in hushed tones to our neighbouring table, all jocularly unconcerned by the two concussive smacks this poor woman’s head had sustained, and hit the creaky four-poster sack when the bar closed an hour or so later.

So, the verdict on the Drover’s Inn: eat somewhere else, stay away from naked flames and pray you don’t get so drunk they go all Stasi on you, and you’ll have a grand old time.

* * *

The ‘Fynn did not, as it turned out, play a gig yesterday: the implosion of the Average Folk Band put paid to that. Rest in peace, AFB.