Heir B&B!
It’s Prince Charles’s luxury bed and breakfast venture at his darling granny’s favourite castle, where for £160 a night, you can enjoy peat fires, yards of chintz and her treasured doggy knick-knacks
For three weeks every August, the Queen Mother would decamp to the Castle of Mey, her beloved Scottish retreat near John o’Groats. ‘one feels so beautifully far away,’ she said of her ‘dear little castle by the sea’.
Bought for £100 in 1952, after the death of her husband, George VI, the place had the ability to lift her spirits like no other.
She enjoyed taking her meals in the dining room, which offered her stunning views, and traditional Scottish fare such as ‘clootie’ dumpling (‘cloot’ being the Scots for the cloth in which the suet is boiled) and foilwrapped ‘ dishwasher salmon’ (one cycle has a similar effect to poaching and delivers perfect results, apparently) were among her favourite dishes.
Since her death in 2002, Prince Charles, who was so close to his ‘ darling grandmother’, has faithfully kept up the tradition of summer sojourns at the Castle of Mey, set in spendid isolation in 18,000 acres.
It was not a place to everyone’s liking, though. For one thing, it was exceedingly draughty, prompting some members of the royal Family to describe the ‘ dear little castle’ as ‘the fridge’.
The notoriously plain-speaking Princess Margaret was even blunter. ‘I can’t think why you have such a horrible place as the Castle of Mey,’ she once told her mother.
To which Her Majesty replied: ‘ Well, darling you needn’t come again.’
Now, the rest of us have a chance to discover who was right as the Castle of Mey acquires a more modern nickname — ‘Heir B&B’, a jokey reference to the online rental outfit Airbnb.
An adjacent granary has been converted into a ten-bedroom bed & breakfast with the first guests paying from £160 a night, and checking in from today.
The castle has actually been open to the public since 2002, but visitor numbers have been dwindling — hence this new venture spearheaded by the Prince of Wales.
An extension, in pinkish local slate stone, seamlessly blends with the original 17thcentury grain store (used in more recent times to house the Queen Mother’s cars and provide lodgings for her chauffeur).
The result, to quote one expert visitor, is ‘traditional Scottish country house with a newish twist’, comprising peat fires, chintz sofas, floral cushions — and a cabinet full of the Staffordshire dogs to which the Queen Mother was partial.
The walls — featuring Landseer dog prints, Scottish landcapes and coastal paraphernalia, from barometers to a ship wheel — are painted in ‘ chalky’ shades of Farrow & Ball, and every fabric is by Colefax and Fowler and was approved by the Prince.
THere
are certainly plenty of talking points. In the dining room, for example, there are six grandfather clocks — especially prized by the Queen Mother.
‘When they all go “ding ding ding”, it makes you laugh,’ says Michael Fawcett, Prince Charles’s former valet who remains a vital part of his office as chief executive of the Prince’s Foundation, the charity that managed the project.
Fawcett is an old hand at such ventures, having helped design the Prince’s London residence, Clarence House, as well as Dumfries House in Ayrshire, the stately home which is now the base for Charles’s charitable endeavours.
‘The trick was to make the rooms feel as though they were part of the castle — to give it a patina of the Queen Mother and the Duke of rothesay [the title Charles uses in Scotland], to make something they would recognise as home.’
The royals would certainly feel at
home in the bedrooms, which have been furnished with luxurious coroneted canopies.
Fawcett, as some readers may recall, was the man who, when the Prince broke his arm playing polo, famously squeezed the toothpaste on his master’s toothbrush, before he had to resign amid claims that he had sold off official gifts — on Charles’s orders — and pocketed a percentage of the proceeds. He was cleared by an internal inquiry of any financial misconduct.
His new job, which gives him responsibility for all the future king’s public work and puts him in charge of a multi-million-pound budget, shows the steadfast faith Charles has in him.
It was while staying with friends on the north coast of Scotland and still mourning the death of her husband, the King, at 56, that the Queen Mother first gazed on the Castle of Mey, then a dilapidated house set to be abandoned.
She promptly wrote to her treasurer, Sir Arthur Penn. ‘When I was in Caithness I passed a dear little castle down by the sea, and I discovered it was going to be sold for nothing, just the value of the lead on the roof,’ she informed him.
‘ This seemed so sad that I thought I would buy it and escape there occasionally . . . when life becomes hideous. The old man who has lived there was very anxious to give it to me, but I resisted the kind gesture and he has now offered it to me for £100.’
The castle was indeed sold to the Queen Mother for that less than princely sum.
Protracted restoration of the building meant it would be 1955 before she could stay there.
one of the most frequently used rooms in the castle was the library where she did her correspondence each day, at a desk decorated with photographs of her late husband.
Today, the Queen Mother’s presence at the castle is evident, from the 1954 fridge and the pile of Dick Francis novels on a table, to a telegram sent to the royal Yacht Britannia (which brought other members of the royal Family to stay with the Queen Mother each summer) asking for urgent supplies to be sent to the castle. ‘ There is a grave shortage of lemons,’ she wrote. ‘Could you please bring a couple with you. M.’
According to her official biographer, William Shawcross, nothing gave her more pleasure in Scotland than picnics. ‘And they happened almost every day, rain, snow or shine,’ he noted.
‘Again, the form was simple or fun. especially the jam puff and cream pastries which could explode all over the faces of the uninitiated. And, to create the right atmosphere, a glass of something was always welcome — gin and Dubonnet on picnics, champagne on many other occasions.’
It was once revealed that the annual running costs to the taxpayer — to keep the Castle of Mey in tip-top condition for the Queen Mother’s short summer holiday — was nearly half-a-million pounds.
So, £160 a night for a room is cheap at the price. And perhaps the menu will even include Stornoway clootie dumpling and foil-wrapped ‘dishwasher salmon’.