Blacksheepish
From India to Invergarry: at home with the entrepreneurial clan with designs on an empire of hotels in the Highlands. By Alison Gray
Alison Gray has a Highland hillwalking holiday
I've forgotten how to pack. I was never very good at it in Before Times to be honest, optimistically taking too many T-shirts on Scottish holidays when I should have packed fleeces, and once when going to a wedding, forgetting my dress. So heading to the Highlands at the tail end of a very cold and wet spring is presenting me with all manner of packing dilemmas.
We'll be going up hills, but we'll also, great joy, be going to a restaurant for dinner. I've taken at least one of everything, remembered the shoes and crucially, have got the bag zipped shut. Glen Shiel is shimmering in the May light and our senses are pin sharp after months confined to EH12.
For this much longed for adventure we're checking out the Black Sheep family of hotels, established by Indian entrepreneur Sanjay Narang and his sister Rachna after they fell in love with the Highlands on holiday. They currently operate three hotels, have bought another two and the ambition is to grow the group to ten hotels exclusively in the Highlands.
Perhaps the most well known of the Black Sheep enterprises is the legendary walking hostelry The Cluanie Inn. Established in 1787 as an isolated staging post located to feed and water drovers turning south from Tomdoun via Loch Loyne, the Cluanie's story is also inextricably linked to the turbulent years of the Jacobite risings, with Jacobites hiding at the inn after their defeat in the bloody battle against King George's men in 1719 in Glen Shiel.
With something like 29 munros directly accessible from the inn on the road to Skye, in more recent years it's garnered a reputation as a legendary destination among walkers, its white exterior a beacon of light, offering food and shelter, beer and crisps at the end of a long day in the mountains. Bobble-hatted baggers won't believe it; there's now a room with a sauna and ours featured a Jacuzzi bath. And the add-ons keep on coming. There are sites for cabins across the road from the inn where the newly opened Landour Bakehouse is also located. This place is going to fly. How can it not with great coffee, a selection of home baking including pleasingly large fruit scones, slices of lemon drizzle cake and veg and lamb samosas, all to sit in or take-away? And we love the legend on the wall, “We do not have wifi. Talk to each other. Pretend it's 1895.” The bakehouse is named after the villages of Landour and Mussoorie in the Himalayas where Mr Narang went to school and fell in love with mountains.
As you might expect food is at the heart of the Black Sheep offer, where menus across the three properties list Scottish classics next to Indian favourites. At Rokeby Manor in Invergarry we visited the restaurant called Emily's Byre and enjoyed the delights of the Naanwich, as flavoursome as it sounds with delicately spiced lamb and green salad layered between fresh blackened naans, straight from the tandoor oven. We ordered aloo tuk, deliciously addictive potato bites as a side.
The third Black Sheep enterprise is located just outside Invergarry, the village that first caught the imagination of Mr Narang. The Whispering Pines Lodge was originally a hunting lodge built in the 1800s when the Macmartins of Letterfinlay owned the land. It became a hotel in the mid 1900s and
Glen Shiel is shimmering in the May light and our senses are pin sharp