Rest and Be Thankful Viewpoint

Rest and Be Thankful is the top of the A83 road pass between Loch Long and Loch Fyne, about 245 m up, with a big car park on the Glen Croe side and the whole glen laid out below it. It's the most famous road view in this corner of the park, and it's famous for a good reason: you've just come up a long, steep climb, and from the top you can see the old road looping down the valley floor that people used to have to walk. Stop here even if you're only passing through on the way to Inveraray or Oban. Ten to twenty minutes covers the view, the marker stone and a sit on a bench; add a bit longer if the food van's in and there's a queue.

Walk to the edge on the glen side and Glen Croe runs away south-east below you: steep grass on the left, plantation forest on the right, and a narrow single-track road doing a hairpin right under the car park before wandering down the middle of the glen. That's the Old Military Road, pushed through here by soldiers in the middle of the eighteenth century, after the Jacobite risings, so troops could be moved around the Highlands. The climb out of the glen was so long and steep that travellers got into the habit of stopping at the top to rest and be thankful, and the soldiers carved the words into a stone at the summit. The original stone is long gone, but its replacement stands at the bottom of the car park where the old road comes in, and you can still make out the lettering recording the road's repair by the 93rd Regiment in 1768 and its handover to the road commissioners in 1814. Johnson and Boswell came over the pass in 1773, and Wordsworth walked it with his sister Dorothy in 1803 and later wrote a sonnet about it.

The road you drove up was built in the late 1930s on the slope above the old one, and the old road hasn't retired. This pass gets landslides after heavy rain, and when they close the A83 the military road below you gets pressed back into service as the diversion.

For the photo, get the hairpin of old road in the bottom of the frame and let it lead the eye down the glen. It gives the slopes their scale.

A catering van usually parks up in the car park, serving hot filled rolls, burgers, soup, tea and coffee at fair prices. The venison burger with onions is the thing to order, and the bacon and brie roll gets mentioned too. There are picnic tables and simple wooden benches facing the view, so it's a proper place to eat rather than a lay-by. There are no toilets here; the nearest public ones are down the glen at Ardgartan.

Turn round and cross the A83 and you're at Loch Restil, a small loch under the steep face of Beinn an Lochain. If you want a real walk, Ben Donich starts from a track a few hundred metres along the B828 towards Lochgoilhead: a Corbett of 847 m, about 7.5 km there and back with 575 m of climbing, three and a half to four and a half hours, on a decent path with one short easy scramble.

The car park is on the A83 at the very top of Glen Croe, at the junction with the B828 to Lochgoilhead. Coming up from Arrochar it's on your left just as the road levels out. It's a big car park, but it's a busy one: coach tours pull in, and on a fine summer morning it can be heaving by mid-morning. Buses between Glasgow and Oban or Campbeltown stop here too. The pass is high and exposed, so cloud often sits on the tops even when the glen is clear. Because landslides close this road from time to time, check the road status before you set out if you're relying on it to get west.