Long before Luss was Glendarroch, it was Clachan dhu - the dark village - tucked beneath the Luss Hills on the loch's western bank. Christianity arrived early. Saint Kessog, an Irish missionary, is said to have brought the faith here in the early sixth century, in the same era that Columba was carrying it to the Hebrides further north. The churchyard preserves the evidence: simple cross-slabs that may date as far back as the seventh century, and a hogback grave-cover from the eleventh, the chunky boat-shaped tomb-stones that mark the period when Norse and Gaelic Scotland were learning to live with each other. Inside the present parish church, a well-preserved late medieval effigy of a bishop lies in stone, eyes closed, hands folded, watching over fifteen centuries of village dead.

The current Church of Scotland building was completed in 1875 by Sir James Colquhoun, 5th Baronet, in memory of his father - the 4th Baronet, also Sir James - who had drowned in the loch in December 1873. The Colquhouns have held Luss as their ancestral seat for centuries; the clan name and the village are inseparable. Today the church hosts more than a hundred weddings a year, mostly for couples from outside the parish who have found their way here through online services or a wedding photographer's portfolio. The 5th Baronet built a memorial. He may also have built one of the most-photographed church doorways in Scotland.

About a mile south, in a cove at Aldochlay, a small stone figure stands on a plinth knee-deep in the loch. Locals call him Wee Peter. A legend grew up that he commemorates a child who drowned here. The truth is sadder and more ordinary: a local stonemason erected the statue in 1890, having found it in a London scrapyard, and parked it in the cove after a brief spell beside the railway. He has stood there ever since, hands on his cap, smile unchanging, while generations of visitors invented increasingly tender stories to explain him. The invented story is the one that sticks. The factual one has to be retold.

Luss is now formally a conservation village, with thirty-six buildings in its Outstanding Conservation Area, twenty-four of them Category B or C listed. Several of the cottages share names that announce their twinning: Avonlea and Ivy Bank, Fernlea and Ivy Cottage, Laurel Cottage and Ravenslea, Rose Cottage and The Sheiling, Yewbank and Lonaigview. They are identical constructions, built for workers in the slate quarries and now polished into something closer to a postcard. The village also runs a kiltmaker and a bagpipe works - functioning industries, not heritage props. Out on the loch, the Luss pier sends boats up to Inveruglas and back, and a water taxi service crosses the southern basin to Balloch, where you can catch a train into Glasgow in under an hour.

Step onto the pier and turn north. Ben Lomond closes the view - the most southerly Munro in Scotland, 974 metres of sandstone and gneiss rising directly from the eastern shore. The peak is a magnet for day-walkers from Glasgow because it is reachable by car-and-boat in a single morning and back by dinner. From Luss, the mountain looks like a backdrop drawn by someone who decided the composition needed more drama. The light on the summit moves all day, sometimes in minutes. Locals say the village's 120 permanent residents have learned to live with crowds the way Highlanders have always lived with weather: complain, but show up regardless. The Loch Lomond Golf Club, host of the Scottish Open for several years, sits within the village's boundaries. Even golf, here, is played in the shadow of a Munro.