On the north side of Loch Maree within Scotland’s rugged west coast lies an unspoiled Highland wilderness with mottled hills, groaning winds, and pure glassy lochs. Golden eagles soar through a vast, melancholic sky, and the mythical red stag lords over his kingdom of moss and purple heather. It’s also here that you’ll typically find the stalking set (the stealthy pursuit of deer on foot with the intention of hunting—a well-worn Scottish tradition requiring patience and skill).
A. A. Gill was often one of them. For 15 years, the late, prolific author and journalist undertook an annual pilgrimage to Letterewe Estate, escaping life’s tribulations and channeling his primal instincts by stalking the beguiling hills. And as Gill so deliciously recounts in a 2012 travel feature for GQ, Letterewe Estate is “a place that rubs its knuckles over smoky fires. From the eves, glassy, dust-lidded eyes catch the firelight and follow you with a mournful, flickering disinterest.”
My great-grandfather Colonel Bill Whitbread, had a similar response to Letterewe—subsuming any malaise from running a brewery and a large family in the estate’s endless landscape of claret and rust. For my great-grandfather, long stints were spent here sailing his 65’ classic ketch yacht, Lone Fox, along West Scotland’s scenic shores—a passion confirmed with his sponsorship of the Whitbread Around the World Race—and rambling through Loch Maree’s banks—occasionally with his family and rarely without a supply of whiskey.
He acquired the estate in the wake of World War II, selling it in its entirety over 30 years later to the Dutch businessman and philanthropist Paul Fentener Van Vlissingen. A fitting heir, Van Vlissingen played a seminal role in the first “right to roam” negotiations (securing the general public’s right to access and enjoy areas of privately owned land, lakes, and rivers), christened the Letterewe Accord.
When I was growing up, family anecdotes of Letterewe were mythical in flavor. Bags, wide-eyed children, and dogs were flung into a boat, and it was as though they were rowing back in time, to the ends of the earth. Map surveys suggest this sentiment isn’t so far-fetched—the estate lies further from “civilization” than anywhere else on the U.K. mainland.
My mother recalls visiting Letterewe as a child with strict instructions to park the car and lift a dark flap on a wooden sign, signaling to the expectant parties over the loch that visitors had arrived. Indeed, if a thick cloak of fog obscured the sign, my mother, along with any other pre–mobile phone guests, would have to drop their bags in a nearby pub until dawn.
Today, the new owners have carefully guided the lodge into the 21st century, while preserving its 11 o’clock whiskey-and-wood-paneled soul. In the turreted main lodge—one of three that Letterewe Estate has opened up for paying guests—large groups and families can hunker down in warm four-poster beds (a far cry from the rooms my mother’s generation once exhaled puffs of cold breath into while clutching hot-water bottles).
Sleeping up to 19 guests, with children and dogs welcome, inside it’s all about long candlelight suppers. Chefs can be organized in advance (although families typically bring cooks with them, to stay in separate accommodation alongside the main lodge), otherwise it’s advisable to hit the supermarket near Inverness Airport, with butchers and small grocery stores in Poolewe or Gairloch for any top-ups.
The estate lies further from “civilization” than anywhere else on the U.K. mainland.
A Narnia-like games cupboard and a dense oak wood surrounding the lodge still absorb long afternoons, with hours lost curled up in the library, or post-dinner games of snooker with a tinkling glass of whiskey in hand. Adults slip back into child-like awe when spotting a wild goat or a pine marten skirting the woods, perhaps even a white-tailed eagle or a peregrine falcon patrolling the skies.
Elsewhere on the estate is Ardlair, a fishing lodge cast away from civilization and electricity with its own beat, and boat, on Loch Maree. Artists and photographers are drawn to Ardlair’s rugged beauty, where a carpet of wildflowers spills from a wall of ancient oak and badgers sniff the cool air. This lodge lies at the foot of a ridge where guests can access the water for fly-fishing or loch-side picnics, or where they can simply disappear into the hills on meandering tracks leading to Fionn Loch.
Likewise, there are no roads to Carnmore, Letterewe’s most secluded lodge—a signature gray-and-white speck of the estate that has wandered off into the bowl of several mountains, where it lies stranded and splendid. To reach it, up to eight guests are driven along a bumpy estate track, before gliding across glassy Fionn Loch and its forested islands to the lodge’s edge. Scotland’s remotest Munro, a’Mhaighdean (the maiden), spies newcomers from over 3,000 feet and demands respect. Evenings are spent huddled around log fires, and before too long guests find themselves in the grip of the wild, stranded between Fionn and Dubh Lochs (teeming with large ferox trout), and in the menacing shadow of Carnmore Crag.
Not long ago, at home in Dorset, I was agonizing, bleary-eyed, over a late-night article, the background din of Netflix comforting me as I wrote. I leaned forward over mounds of chocolate wrappers, and there was Gill taking Anthony Bourdain on a trip through our childhood stories, through a patchwork of tobacco, purple, and green, to stalk and lug a red stag home on horseback—the same white ponies that appear in grainy family photographs.
Rosalyn Wikeley is a U.K.-based freelance travel writer and the creative-content editor at Condé Nast Traveler
