Ideal author’s retreat
Leading novelist’s former home has the write stuff
IT is somehow fitting that a fish should sit atop the weather vane at Kerrow House in Glen Affric. The species depicted here is the salmon, reflecting the plentiful supplies which swim past this former hunting and fishing lodge on the edge of the River Glass. But the romantics among us may also be allowed to interpret it as a lasting tribute to a former owner of the Inverness-shire property, who penned the classic Scottish novel The Silver Darlings.
Neil M Gunn is considered one of the country’s most important early 20th century novelists.
The son of a fisherman, he lived at Kerrow House in the 1950s and wrote rote three books while under its roof.
His legendary novel aboutt the harvesting of herring – the Silver Darlings of the title – recalls a bygone age in the e North of Scotland.
The displaced people of the Highlands had to learn to live off the sea after being kicked out of their homes during the notorious Clearances.
They retreated to some wild locations in Caithness, such as the hamlet of Badbea where the wind was so strong, animals and even children had to be tethhered to rocks to prevent them m being swept over the cliffs.
By comparison, all is peaceful ceful at Kerrow House, nestling tling quietly in Glen Affric about an hour’s drive from the village of Drumnadrochit.
The River Glass flows so close it can be seen and heard from a number of the A-Frame chalets in the grounds, which come with the property.
Currently, the main house is used as a B&B, while its Stalker’s Wing provides self-catering accommodation for holidaymakers.
Owner John Perkins said visitors are drawn here from all over the world, including Germany, Belgium, Holland, Australia, America and Canada.
While most fish for trout, wily anglers from England and France tend to book up during the two weeks a year that Kerrow House has the rights to a quarter mile of salmon fishing; hence the fish on top of the weather vane.
There is a profusion of accommodation here. The Kerrow House B&B section has a dining room, dining kitchen, sitting room, garden room, six bedrooms and two attic rooms.
There are four further bedrooms in the Stalker’s Wing, plus a sitting room and dining kitchen and two holidaymakers’ cottages and two chalets in the grounds.
Mr Perkins said: ‘It is a lovely hunting lodge, originally built for the Chisholm family in 1770. It includes four cottages, fitted out to a high standard and gives us a very good living, but it’s time for us to retire now. ‘You get fans of Neil Gunn coming up to the door. I once heard from a Neil Gunn Society in Dingwall. They wanted to put a plaque up on the wall but I ne never heard any more about it. ‘B ‘But we’ve got even more links to famous people. Wartime leader W Winston Churchill used to stop here. There’s a local tale that on one occasion he lost his watch, which was never found. It’s also rumoured that he learned to drive nearby.’
In the 12 years Neil M Gunn lived here, he wrote three books: Bloodhunt, The Other Landscape and The Atom of D Delight. The latter was his final novel in asa series of 20. One reviewer said it wasw a spiritual autobiography, a celeb celebration of the sights and sounds Gun Gunn encountered in his life, which alm almost certainly i ncludes the surroundings of Kerrow House.
He wrote: ‘Once you accept The Atom of Delight in its own terms and live in its world, it is wise, enlivening, humorous and full of golden light.’ An estate agent could scarcely put it better.
For details, contact Kevin Maley at Strutt & Parker, Inverness. Phone: 01463 719171 or email: kevin.maley@struttandparker.com.