Kinloch Lodge

Kinloch Lodge has been a farmhouse, a shooting lodge, a public bar and a family home, and a stag's antlers are still fixed to its white gable. In 1972 Godfrey Macdonald, 8th Lord Macdonald and 35th High Chief of his clan, opened it as a hotel with his wife Claire, who ran the kitchen. The house is long and harled under grey slate, on the shore of Loch na Dal in Sleat. Eighteen rooms are split between the North Lodge, with the restaurant and the bar, and the South Lodge by the water, where the suites look straight over the loch. Inside it is country house rather than design hotel: patterned curtains, a wool throw across the bed, and in one bedroom tall windows open onto a balcony above the shore. Behind the lodge a path climbs to Leitir Fura, a former settlement, for views the hotel says defy description, and it wisely leaves them at that.

Recommended for anyone who comes to Skye to be out on the hill all day and wants a serious dinner after it, and for families who would trade a kids' club for a ghillie. Babysitting can be arranged, and dogs are allowed. The lodge's ghillie takes guests mushroom hunting in Kinloch Forest, gathering scurvy grass and sea aster on the shore, fly-fishing for wild brown trout, or stalking deer around the Cuillin, which a shooting lodge would recognise. Dinner is Jordan Webb's, chef here since 2020, whose kitchen grinds kelp from the shore into a brining powder for the fish and picks salad leaves from the polytunnel outside the door. Afterwards the fire pit on the lawn is there for wine in the sunshine or whisky in the mist, and on Skye it pays to plan for both.