£2.25m hotel where assassins sharpened skills
IT kept some of the greatest secrets of the Second World War, including housing a guerrilla army.
So pivotal was Arisaig House that the entire area around the Inverness-shire property was sealed off and made a forbidden zone to allow assassins to be trained for missions in Europe.
Seven decades on, the 12-bedroom Victorian manor, which has for some years operated as a country house hotel, is on the market for £2.25 million.
A number of estate houses, used for self-catering accommodation, are also part of the sale, including a two-bedroom gardeners’ cottage, the threebedroom Fagus Lodge, the fourbedroom bungalow Achnahanat, and Orchard House, a five-bedroom house overlooking the walled garden.
Today, there is almost no trace of its history. But during the war, even locals required passes to travel in and out of the wider Lochaber area as personnel, hired by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), were put through their paces.
At the helm of the SOE project were Eric ‘Bill’ Sykes and William ‘Shanghai-Buster’ Fairbairn, world experts in ‘silent killing’ techniques.
They had led the anti-gangster squad in Shanghai, where their uncompromisingly violent methods virtually destroyed its underworld.
In 1941, they were poached by the SOE and sent to Scotland to teach dirty tricks to recruits.
It was here that operatives were sent to carry out one of the most audacious assassinations of the war, the execution of Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘Butcher of Prague’. It inspired the 2016 movie Anthropoid, starring Cillian Murphy.