‘Inheriting a really big pile is simply appalling’
Being the custodian of an estate as grand as Luss is a daunting task, as Eleanor Doughty found out from Sir Malcolm and Lady Colquhoun
Sir Malcolm and Lady Colquhoun live a double life. Half the year they’re in charge at Broomwood Hall School in Wandsworth, south London; the rest of the time they run Luss, a 40,000-acre Scottish estate on the banks of Loch Lomond. It is quite the contrast.
Luss has been in the Colquhoun family since 1368, when Robert, 5th chief of Colquhoun, married the 6th Laird of Luss’s daughter, merging the two families. Sir Malcolm, 71, is 31st chief of Colquhoun and 33rd of Luss.
He inherited Luss from his father, Ivar, 11 years ago, upon his death at the age of 92. “He was brought up in a very different world,” he says. Sir Malcolm’s grandfather, Iain, was “a great man – when he died, in 1948, he was probably the most loved and revered Scotsman of his generation, and a great war hero. The one thing he never had was any money – he had a big house which was crumbling, and full of damp and dry rot”.
Growing up in Rossdhu, the estate’s classical mansion that was built in 1772, Sir Malcolm thought he had a life like any other. “You think everyone lives like that because you don’t know any better. I had a perfectly wonderful time there. It was quite solitary – you tend not to have friends in the locality, but you just accept it for what it is.”
Over the years, the estate has changed shape. Its land is “hilly, very beautiful,” he says, “but completely useless from any sort of commercial point of view.” Now sitting at about 40,000 acres, it was once much larger. “My father sold off about 30,000 acres after the war to pay
death duties, and in the 19th century [when land was sold off], it was that again, I would think. Such is life.”
Farming on such an estate isn’t particularly lucrative. “Some years it makes a tiny profit, other years it makes a whacking great loss. We do it because it’s the right thing to do. If all the subsidies were to be withdrawn, then one would walk away from it and revert it to being beautiful hillside.” The land is “very marginal and difficult because it’s very steep”. There’s a forestry business, but logistics are tricky: “planting the trees is fine, but getting them off the hill again 40 years later is a big deal”. Were it possible to exchange his lot for something else, Sir Malcolm would settle for “2,000 or 3,000 acres of really good land”.
The biggest change in modern times is that Rossdhu, formerly the family home, is now the centre of Loch Lomond Golf Club. “My papa moved out of the house in 1972, and we kept it until the mid-Eighties, when we let it to some golf course developers,” Sir Malcolm explains. “It’s on a lease, so it will come back to us eventually, but not in my lifetime.”
It’s better this way. “The fate of most owners of these big places is to be bankrupted by them… The developers have spent millions of pounds on the place, and it’s in far better condition today than the day it was built. We can still go there whenever we want, and the staff treat me as if it is my home.” They live in another house on the estate called Camstradden House.
There’s plenty else to do on the estate, in any case. The smokehouse, for example, has been going for three years. “It’s something we hope will become profitable in time,” says Sir Malcolm, who, presently, has an awful lot of smoked salmon to eat. “It just seemed like the right thing to do – and we love smoked salmon.”
Then there’s the self-service filling station on the A82, which was inspired by a trip the couple took to France. Having nearly run out of petrol, they came across a self-service station and decided to bring the idea home. “There aren’t many petrol stations that are open as you travel across Scotland, so it’s been very useful,” says Lady Colquhoun.
“It’s another part of the jigsaw, to regenerate Luss,” adds Sir Malcolm. “Unless you do that, these villages die.”
His dream is to build a chairlift “somewhere from Luss up the hill. It would be marvellous – not many people take advantage of right to roam. As a means of getting people out into the beyond, it’s something I’d love to do.” The greatest challenge for Luss is the seasonality. “If you run a hotel, you make money April to October, and then proceed to lose it all again November until March.”
Looking after Luss is a burden. “It’s a huge responsibility – I’m charged with passing it on to the next generation in a better shape than I found it, for a start, and you’re also employing people that depend on you to pay their mortgages.” Sir Malcolm’s son, Patrick, 38, is involved with the business, and will eventually take over. “Then we can relax,” he chuckles.
The pair divide their time between London and Luss with ease. Regular trips abroad are also in the diary: the Colquhouns set up Northwood African Education Foundation in 2011, a charity to build and run schools for vulnerable children in Ethiopia. This is a slightly longer commute than one to London. “The convenience of it is why we’ve been able to do both,” says Lady Colquhoun. “I would hate to have to decide to just be in one place.”
There is a perceived pressure on those who are due to inherit big houses to go “home” to them, Sir Malcolm says. “That’s what they feel, though I don’t think they have to. If you inherit [a really big] pile, it’s simply appalling. Suddenly your life has been torn apart and you’re expected to go and look after this pile of stones. I wouldn’t blame anybody who said, ‘I just don’t want to know’.”
‘Some years it makes a tiny profit, other years a whacking great loss. We do it because it’s right’
‘I’m charged with passing it on to the next generation in a better shape than I found it’