Negronis, spiced popcorn and haggis bonbons | the West Highlands

Since the hot, clear day when my mother and grandmother first showed me the view from the top of Dunadd Fort, I’ve been drawn back again and again to the southerly part of the West Highlands. I’ve raced in the Lochearnhead Highland Games, I’ve skinny-dipped in my ancestral loch and, more sedately, I’ve been driving around looking for places to stay that make up for my lack of an ancestral seat. Here are two restaurants with rooms, a castle and an hotel, all family-run, all on the remote side, and each between an hour and half and an afternoon’s drive from Glasgow. The four of them together make a nice itinerary for a week or so’s touring. Only two are gourmet bait, but all four deserve high praise for their cooked breakfasts.

The least far-flung of my favourites, Monachyle Mhor nonetheless feels beautifully middle-of-nowhere. At the petering-out of a single-track lochside road in the Trossachs, close to the Boar’s Rock hill that gives my tribe, the Clan McLaren, its war cry, this is one of the hippest of Scotland’s rural hotels. It’s a glamorous addition to a working farm, with both aspects masterminded by Tom Lewis, farmer, entrepreneur, food-lover and man with an eye for interesting lighting design.

I’ve raced in the Lochearnhead Highland Games, I’ve skinny-dipped in my ancestral loch and, more sedately, I’ve been driving around looking for places to stay that make up for my lack of an ancestral seat

There are five guest rooms inside the pink-painted farmhouse, and nine around the courtyard buildings. I get Sawmill, which is one of the more rock ‘n’ roll of the rooms: it feels very private, somewhere you could have a lot of fun, and looks good, with a chaise longue, a white Established & Sons lamp, an old dressmaker’s model wearing a paste necklace, and a luxuriously minimal bathroom featuring a huge bath and a walk in shower/steam room with a slate-topped bench. Who cares if it’s raining?

Tom’s sister, Melanie, is an artist, and her modern canvases lend substance to the property’s slightly edgy style. There’s a patrician feel to the sitting room, decorated in tweed, velvet and leather in mossy, heathery colours. In contrast, the bar feels almost urban, with its teal tongue and groove, sweetie-coloured Scandinavian stools, and Wild West bric à brac. I’ve been expecting great things of the food, cooked with produce that’s nearly all homegrown, farm-raised or foraged. It is indeed top-drawer, with  nods to recent trend: canapés of spiced popcorn and haggis bonbon; smoked potato with the pink fillet of Highland beef.

The Lewises have reeled off a whole string of Mhor enterprises in nearby Callander, notably a bakers and a fishmongers. Monachyle Mhor itself is one of the best small hotels in the UK: stylish, unique and slightly cheeky. There’s another “room” you’ll have to book ahead for: the Lovestruck, a converted horse truck that’s something like a log cabin on wheels, parked a five-minute walk from the main house, with a view straight down the glen and over Loch Voil.

The food’s the thing at Kilberry Inn, too, a smaller restaurant with rooms run by David Wilson and Clare Johnson, whose intense hard work and intuitive sense of what guests want is really something. It’s so wonderful turning up here in the dark and being served a perfect negroni within minutes that I’m convinced, for once and for all, that restaurant work is a vocation, not a job. David looks after the guests – mainly couples up from the Central Belt areas – while Clare cooks, brilliantly, self-taught and inspired by Simon Hopkinson and Claudia Roden. Look out for beef or lamb from Ormsary Estate, perfect potted crab, and scallops with chorizo or pork belly.

As I’ve come to expect when the going is potholey and arduous, the welcome couldn’t be warmer

The dining room’s old stone walls are hung with paintings by well-known local artists, and an open fire and wood-burning stove make sure it feels as cosy as it looks. The five contemporary-looking rooms are named for the islands of Gigha, Jura, Islay, Arran and Texa; bedlinen and robes are well up to par, and I’m charmed by home-made ginger biscuits and probably the sweetest ever “what to do locally” guide, scrapbook-like and quite touching. Here, due west of Argyll & Bute, the terrain is heavily wooded (both ancient and modern) and, again, feels remoter than it really is, with few metalled roads but scores of trails and cycle paths in the forests – where you might spot red squirrels, otters and, recently reintroduced, beavers. The going is potholey but, as I drive away towards Crinan Canal, I’m treated to one wonderful sea view after another, over Loch Sween and the Sound of Jura.

It’s 43 years since the Ryans acquired Crinan Hotel, an ancient drovers’ inn that assumed a more baronial identity during Victorian times. As I’m given the tour by Nick Ryan (I swear his trews match the chairs in the bar) I learn that he and his wife, the artist Frances Macdonald, now see the place as “an art gallery with rooms”. Where there was once a seafood restaurant on the first floor, overlooking the tiny boatyard and lock-keeper’s cottage, visitors can now view (and buy) art by Scottish artists from the Royal Glasgow Institute and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour. A second gallery is housed in a coffee shop down the road.

There’s nothing trendy about Crinan Hotel, and it’s the very absence of all that that I love. What matters here is the seascape – namely, that view over the water to Moine Mhor and Duntrune Castle – and the welcome. People who run hotels down the bottom of steep, narrow lanes at the end of waterways leading to the Inner Hebrides tend to be warm souls, and that goes equally for the long-serving members of staff (wee Mary has been here for 40 years, Chris a mere 20).

you might spot white-tailed eagles, seals, basking sharks…

My room is big, comfortable and very quiet, with a preposterously lovely view over Loch Crinan towards Moine Mhor and Kilmartin Glen, where I’m headed the next day to scramble up Dunadd again. The hotel is as full of life as its remarkable owners: look out for the white piano originally shipped in for Dave Brubeck; Nick’s collie cross Fly, who uses the lift if you’ll push the button for him; and, of course, Frances’ dashing seascapes. Sailors love it here, especially the pub, where you can eat razor clams from Colonsay, and smoked salmon from Rothesay. Dogs are welcome – 11 at once is the record.

Last and most thrilling, Glengorm Castle reveals itself only teasingly as you approach it by road from Tobermory. As I’ve come to expect when the going is potholey and arduous, the welcome couldn’t be warmer: about a minute after I ring the bell (an actual bell that you pick up and waggle), owner Tom Nelson appears and shows me from the giant hall into the panelled library. These handsome rooms are open to his B&B guests; they’re hung with covetable 20th-century art, and furnished in pleasingly posh style with well-worn overstuffed sofas and lots of lamps for reading.

Glengorm has five guest bedrooms, decorated in smart toiles and stripes. Then, as well as a self-catering flat in the castle, there’s a spiffy, newer flat above the estate’s excellent coffee shop, and six cottages dotted about – lovely, characterful old buildings, with open fires and pretty interiors. There’s a line-up of fine single malts in the castle library, but no dining laid on, other than the estate’s coffee shop and farm shop, so B&B guests drive out to one of the five pubs in Tobermory (the best food is at MacGochans or the MacDonald Arms).

For a city person like me, Glengorm seems terribly exotic: a farm estate (Tom rears Blackface sheep and Highland cattle), at the furthest tip of a Scottish island it’s taken all day to get to, even in good weather. When you look out of the window of the breakfast room, the sea is right there! I can see it from my room, too – from the bath, in fact. And at various times of year, on walks around the estate, you might spot white-tailed eagles, seals, basking sharks… Tom tells me his 11-year-old daughter, out lambing that afternoon, reported a pod of dolphins. All this, and no locks on the doors. Glorious.

 

Monachyle Mhor
Kilberry Inn
Crinan Hotel
Glengorm Castle

 

A different version of this story previously appeared in the Daily Telegraph