Monkstadt 1745 - Luxury Lodge

The house Flora MacDonald brought the Prince to

Monkstadt was the seat of the MacDonald chiefs until they moved to Armadale in 1798, and on 28 June 1746, three months after Culloden, Flora MacDonald landed below it with Prince Charles Edward Stuart at the point still called Rudha Phrionnsa. Lady Margaret, whose husband's men were hunting him, quietly supplied them and sent them on to Kingsburgh. The MacQueen family bought the house and its farm buildings in the early 1980s and have been restoring them since.

The estate also has self-catering: the two Prestige cottages and the five Steading cottages, both on their own pages.

What that gives you now is a small hotel of nine rooms with a serious kitchen attached, on a part of Skye most visitors drive through on the way to the Quiraing. The suites are named for the people in that story, which sounds like marketing until you are standing at the window looking at the shore it happened on.

Rooms run from 236 square feet to 645. The two four-poster suites, Sir MacDonald and Lady Margaret, have roll-top baths. Alexander's Suite is the largest and has a log burner. MacQueen, the Sunset View Garden Suite, is the one with a private hot tub on the patio, a log burner and a kitchen of its own, which makes it the closest thing here to self-catering.

The rooms

Good to know

Features

Location

Where it puts you

Trotternish is the north end of Skye and the strangest looking part of it. The Quiraing is up the road, a landslip of pinnacles and hidden terraces with a walk that is genuinely unlike anywhere else in Britain, and the Old Man of Storr is further down the same ridge. The Fairy Glen at Uig is a miniature version of the same geology and takes twenty minutes.

West of the house the Minch opens out towards Harris and North Uist, which is why the sunsets get their own room names. Coral Beach at Claigan and Dunvegan Castle are on the other side of the island, an hour or so away, and Portree is half an hour south for the harbour and the shops.