Scottish Serenade - 5
Here’s a trip-to-remember. Take waterproofs, top to toe when going to Kilchoan by Dunton. Girlahead was not prepared but they loaned everything she needed.
Even arriving at the 13,000-acre estate is an adventure. Scotland’s most westerly point, the Knoydart Peninsula, is road-free, reachable only by trekking 24 kms to the end of the 220sq m peninsula - or by taking a 30-minute ferry service from Mallaig, on the mainland (four times a day, weather permitting). There is some tarmac road - about 15km, single track - at Knoydart’s capital, Inverie, population 140, and, believe it or not, at times there are almost traffic jams.
The drive to Kilchoan first goes through the ‘centre of town’, single-floor buildings, some white-harled, despite the weather. One of these low-set buildings, The Old Forge, is pub, teashop, post office - for a population of 140. Knoydart is a community, run by and for its people (they sold the run-down sprawling manor house to an elusive American couple a few years ago). The road passes on, imperceptibly passing from community to Kilchoan Estate, owned by Christoph Henkel, of Amangiri and Dunton Hot Springs fame.
Henkel’d heard Kilchoan’s current Belgian laird wanted to sell. Just as he had done a decade ago in Colorado, buying the one-time mining village that is now Dunton Hot Springs, Relais, ‘on a whim’, so he snapped up Kilchoan. In Scotland, however, rather than converting he’s constructing. From scratch, painstakingly, expensively and impressively – builders commute weekly from the mainland, doing four x 12-hour days. Architect-designer Tom Bartlett (London-based Waldo Studios), has come up with single-storey cabin exteriors, horizontal planks of local spruce, with highlights and doors in deep blood red, and gently sloping coloured-zinc roofs. A heat pump works with a network of 36 x 200m-deep boreholes: for every unit of electricity required, it produces up to four units of heat, stored in a large insulated hot water tank before being distributed through a shared heating network. Kilchoan’s Long House (central eating-drinking) is already finished and operating, as are the wellness hangout – fitness, a glass-walled communal sauna looking out at a Munro and a raging burn that fills Kilchoan’s ice-cold plunge pool - and three sleeping houses. When eventually finished in early 2027, Kilchoan by Dunton will accommodate 36, potentially those coming from around the world for deer stalking, and the elements….
