Loch Achray sits in the heart of the Trossachs, west of Callander in what is now the Stirling council area. It is a freshwater loch, modest in size, with an average depth of about 11 metres and water that takes on the moss-green of the surrounding hills. Loch Katrine lies to the west, Loch Venachar to the east, and Achray slips between them like a quiet hinge in the chain. The shore is broken by birch and oak, the kind of hardwood pocket that survives wherever the deer cannot reach. Mist rises off the surface most mornings before the wind shifts down from Ben Venue. There is something distinctly Trossachs about the scale of the place - small enough to walk around, big enough to vanish into.

The history that anchors Achray begins with a family disgrace. In 1425, James I of Scotland executed Murdoch Stewart, Duke of Albany, for treason. Murdoch's son James Mor Stewart, known to history as James the Fat, fled into exile in Ireland and never returned. His own son, James Beag Stewart - Little James, born around 1410 - did manage to come back. He secured a royal pardon, settled in the Trossachs, and built a small hunting lodge on the island at Loch Achray's western end. The place, according to the chronicler Alexander Campbell, served as a refuge whenever danger came calling. Little James could not inherit the lost Albany estates, but he founded a line. He is the ancestor of the Stewarts of Ardvorlich on Loch Earn, the family whose feuds and tragedies later furnished Sir Walter Scott with material for A Legend of Montrose.

The Argyll story is the one that stuck. A party of Campbells came east to hunt the royal forests of Glenartney and Glensinglais without asking the keeper's leave. They killed deer and roebucks freely. On their way back, weary from the chase, they encountered Little James himself near his island and made the mistake of taunting him about it. They asked what magpie had built its nest on that tiny isle. He answered that this magpie scorned greedy hawks from any quarter. The Campbells promised to return with their own hawks soon enough. James warned that the local hawks of these glens had a way of holding council, and might not allow strangers to hunt within their ancient range. The Campbells kept their word and came back. Little James kept his. He gathered his people from the glens he controlled and met the raiders so warmly, in Campbell's dry phrase, that few returned home to tell of the hawking match for which they had so merrily departed.

By the 19th century, the Trossachs were the engine of Scotland's first tourism boom, lit by Scott's poetry and the steamers on Loch Katrine. Loch Achray became a stop on the picturesque circuit, painted by William Leighton Leitch and others in that romantic register where every rock looks soft and every loch holds a story. The original Trossachs Hotel, built nearby in 1849, fed the trade for over a century before being converted to holiday apartments in the 1990s. The campsite on Achray's southern shore is still one of the most photographed in the national park. The water still mirrors the hills the same way it did when Scott put pen to paper, and the small island - the magpie's nest - is still there, low and wooded, in the western bay.