As a boy I used to stay regularly at Inverarnan House Hotel, as it was then called, with my parents. The hotel had a spectacular view of a beautiful waterfall on the mountainside to the east.

It was a charming old building, owned by the Girvan sisters, who lived on a farm up the road a bit towards Crianlarich. The place was clean and well-managed, the food was simple and well-prepared, and the service was excellent. There was a lounge where guests could sit around a fire and socialise. When I went back decades later with my daughter and by now very elderly mother, the place, now called The Drovers' Inn, had sadly deteriorated. The beautiful stone exterior had been disfigured by some kind of stucco or other coating. The original dining room had been converted into something else, the lounge had been converted into a reasonably attractive dining-room, but everything else had a dilapidated, neglected air about it, with a musty smell, dust everywhere, worn carpets, and tacky artifacts, including a stuffed bear with patches of fur missing, and ugly dusty old paintings in the entrance hallway, to such an extent that we all felt as if our skin was itching merely through having been in the place. It took forever for someone to show up and greet us. Although we had reservations, made before we discovered what had happened to the place, they had lost them, so we just left and never went back. My mother wrote to the Tourist Bureau and complained about it. I never learned the outcome of this complaint. I shudder to think what the Girvan sisters would think if they could see what had happened to their lovely old hotel.