Kippen and Back
Distance: 4 miles/6.5km one way
A low-level, slightly undulating walk from Gargunnock to Kippen. Sections often muddy in winter and after rain.
Leave Gargunnock Square by Main Street and turn left up Drummond Place, turning right before No. 20 along a path known as ‘The Beeches’. Reaching tarmac continue straight on past Watson House, built in the 1820s, across fields on the right. Running alongside the road on the right is a haha - a raised mound built to prevent the lairds seeing traffic.
Turn right after the road bridges the Leckie burn. Continue along a dirt road with the burn on your right. At a wooden cottage turn left along the old military road, which was the main highway linking the castles of Dumbarton and Stirling until the Carse road was built in 1828. Sixteenth century Old Leckie, a lairds house visited by Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745, can be glimpsed from here. On the northern horizon Bens Lomond, Venue, Ledi, Stuc a Chroin and Vorlich mark the line of the Highland Boundary Fault.
One kilometre further on, Burnton of Boquhan, now a row of houses but built as an early school, is reached. Continue straight ahead between stone pillars. Cross the gracefully curving 'auld brig of Boquhan' with modern Boquhan house and gardens on the right. The route now crosses a field, then climbs a short slope to Glentirranmuir and on to the Cross of Kippen where two pubs are located serving meals. Return the way you came or catch a bus back to Gargunnock.
