‘Activities are of the derring-do variety, and the weather is unreliable year round, so it’s useful to be a good sport’: A memorable road trip to the tidal island in Scotland where J. M. Barrie liked to holiday

It was a nine hour drive to Scotland, supposedly, and by the time we locked our front door in London, my husband and I were fed up about going anywhere. For one thing, the roof box on top of the car was creaking pathetically, and I had to crane out of a window to keep an eye on it, and for another, we had been awake until 3am that morning, locating stuff like netted midge hats, and a tick removal card illustrated with the types of hostile insects that you might find in the Highlands in July.

Fortunately, somewhere around Heathrow on the M4, all three of our young children fell asleep, and things began to look up. We pulled over in Oxford, at Hamblin Bread, to buy the world’s best cheese scones, chock full of red Leicester and spring onions, and motored north through the edgelands of Birmingham and then Manchester, stopping and starting as knots of traffic allowed. By the time we made it up the M6 into Cumbria, where you have the cattle-specked Lake District on one side, and the foggy lower reaches of the North Pennines on the other, the fells of both blotted out by mists, we’d rallied and were full of beans. Everything was charming. I made the journey longer by stopping to photograph and look up the names of boreal roadside weeds. These were discovered to be not dissimilar from weeds in the south.

The sun went down around Crieff, which was decked with signs about the town’s upcoming Highland games, and the lochs became dark and unsettling as they slid past the car, startlingly close to the road. About 14 hours after leaving the house, we arrived at The Fortingall, a 10-room Victorian hotel that fronts a country road in Aberfeldy, Perthshire. As the car doors opened, live music was spilling out of the Fortingall’s attached pub, The Ewe, into the black-skied glen.

This most recent iteration of The Fortingall (above) opened in June, but it was purpose built as a hotel in 1891, and there have been lodgings for travellers on this exact stretch of land for even longer. The reason is obvious: on the cusp of Glen Lyon (pronounced ‘lion’), surrounded by a harsh green ridge of mountains with the River Lyon running through it, this is one of the most idyllic valleys in Britain, and travellers of many eras have been susceptible to it. The smart attic rooms where we spread out for a few days, appointed with a feather-topped bed and a separate sitting room with a pull-out sofa, have a crow’s nest view of pine-covered hills and flocks of Scottish Blackface sheep.

Breakfast (and dinner, if you’d like) is served in a bright dining room with textured pink walls and a log fire, and is both traditional (silver toast racks; a postcard fry-up with a tattie scone and slow-cooked, jammy tomatoes) and nicely up-to-date (staff have undergone barista training and deliver espresso-based coffees using beans from nearby Glen Lyon Coffee Roasters). Borrowing rods and a filled picnic hamper from the hotel, we went fishing in Peter’s Pool, a revered swoop of the River Lyon that draws wild salmon with a local guide who taught our eldest son, aged six, how to cast. On another day, we walked to the Allt da Ghob waterfall, which has a 200-metre drop and a sweet, narrow stone bridge at its base, known in the area as The Roman Bridge, although it’s thought to date from the 17^th century.

The driving route from Aberfeldy to Eilean Shona, a 4km-long tidal island in the Inner Hebrides takes around three hours, through the thick of the Scottish Highlands and some of the most spectacular mountain landscapes I’ve seen in my life. The sights are particularly magnificent on the A82, which runs directly through Glencoe, past the colossal Stob Ghabhar and Bidean Nam Bian mountains, among many other peaks, their craggy faces streaked with rivulets and waterfalls. We detoured to Fort William to pick up a week’s worth of groceries, before skirting the edges of boat-filled Loch Eil and comely Loch Eilt, dotted with minute islands, to the jetty across from Eilean Shona. From there, having unloaded suitcases, umbrellas and carrier bags splitting with dried pasta and oversized marshmallows into a motor boat, we chugged 10 minutes across Loch Moidart and disembarked on the island.

Eilean Shona is privately owned by the hotelier and entrepreneur Vanessa Branson, who bought the island along with her ex-husband, Robert Devereux, in 1995. The island has changed hands only a few times since the 19^th century, when it hosted guests such as the American artist John Singer Sargent, who painted two watercolours of Loch Moidart, and later, the writer and playwright J. M. Barrie, who stayed at Eilean Shona House — the largely Victorian, principal building of the island — for a month during a soggy summer in 1920, while working on the screenplay for Peter Pan. In a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, his personal secretary, on August 13, 1920, Barrie wrote about the house and island: ‘This is a very lovely spot, almost painfully so… It almost taketh the breath away to find so perfectly appointed a retreat on these wild shores. The Ritz could not do us better.’

Along with weatherworn Eilean Shona House, which leans handsomely out of the pine trees on a rise as you approach the island, Vanessa found herself with a clutch of former crofting cottages and other structures, which are run as self-catering hideaways. Some of these are aimed at off-grid travellers: gas-powered lamps and fridges, hot water from wood burners, no WiFi, and scanty mobile signal. At the other end of the no-frills spectrum is where we were staying, in the two-bedroom Sail Loft (above), a newly rebuilt boat house (with sundry nautical equipment still stored on the ground floor) in the harbour. The planked, A-frame interiors are serene, painted all white with a copper tub and a woodburning stove in the centre of the cabin. There was a rosy sundown on our first night, and we set the table on the cantilevered front deck to eat spaghetti with our coats on. The tide was in, and the view full-boil romantic: a glassy expanse of the loch, with the medieval ruin of Castle Tioram jutting from a crag on its own, smaller island, directly ahead. We watched, forks swivelling, as other guests walked towards the water in bathrobes, discarding them on the dock before cold-plunging into the loch. A wood-fired sauna stands nearby on the shore, and after swimming, people would dart inside to get warm again.

Activities on Eilean Shona are of the derring-do variety, and the weather is unreliable year round, so it’s useful to be a good sport. Hiking to the highest peak on the island, Beinn a' Bhàillidh will take an easy hour, and the payoff is well worth getting soaked to your shins in peat bogs on the ascent. From the windy cairn at the absolute top, you can see the skidding islands of Muck, Rhum, Eigg, and Skye to the west, and reportedly, on clear days, the pinnacle of Ben Nevis to the east. For a shorter, more child-friendly walk, you can follow the coastal path for 15 minutes or so from the harbour, to a rocky headland known as Contemplation Point. We built a campfire there, in a cleft in the mossy stone, and toasted marshmallows speared with sticks.

There are canoes and kayaks for daily rental (free if you’re staying in the Sail Loft), and you can help yourself to both, along with paddles and life jackets. For our first outing on the water, we paddled for 15 minutes or so across the loch to Castle Tioram, pushing the boat up the short beach so it wouldn’t be washed out by the tide. The ruin itself is unsafe to approach, full of unsteady stonework and sudden drops (its restoration is embroiled in a planning permission fracas), but we explored the rest of the island, grassy paths swagged with heather and ragwort, and ate a picnic beneath the roof-less 13^th century tower. The pitched outline of the Sail Loft was clearly visible across the water from where we sat.

A live-and-let-live atmosphere prevails on the island. That mentality is, in part, down to resources: there aren’t enough staff on Eilean Shona to assess the boating abilities of the guests, or remind them to pay attention to the tide table. But it also feels, in this scarcely inhabited part of the world, like self-determination is baked into the greensward. One morning, a motor boat dropped our family off at Shoe Bay, a remote white sand beach and one of those spectacular, incongruously Caribbean-like settings that crop up in this part of Scotland. We passed dozens of dappled harbour seals on the way over, sleeping and galumphing, scattered across islets that were sometimes only feet wide. At the beach, we found the sand freshly covered in crab shells — the remains of an otter’s breakfast. The motor boat departed with an intention to return sometime after lunch, and we spent a memorable morning in the bay, alternately having cold swims and wrapping ourselves in jumpers and towels, before the boat reappeared.

It lingered near a sandbank while we climbed aboard. Then, as the captain revved the engine, the boat ground into the sand and wouldn’t budge. A pair of passing kayakers, and a family in a four-seater canoe, were hailed to help push, but it was no use. A quick brouhaha played out. The boat was stuck until nightfall, when the tide came back in. And we would have been stuck with it, but for the presence and generosity of the family with the canoe, two of whom remained with us while our captain paddled with the others back to the harbour, over an hour away, to find a RIB to retrieve everybody. Those of us who stayed behind collected limpet shells and built sand castles. The kids took turns staying out of the sun, in the cabin of the beached boat. Hours later we were bathed and dry, with a story to tell.

On the day of departure, we were ready at 9am sharp to catch the tide, and arrowed over the water to the mainland and our parked car. We made our way east on the loch-lined A830, past hundreds of trainspotters waiting around the Glenfinnan Viaduct. Four hours later we rumbled into Edinburgh, where we broke up the drive back to London at the just opened, 214-room Hoxton hotel in Haymarket, a well-connected neighbourhood slightly removed from the action of the New Town and Old Town districts. The hotel is 11 terraced townhouses strung together, with a wide, colourful lobby, fragmented into clusters of tiled fireplaces and plentiful seating, and a sweeping brass bar. Guests belly up to little café tables with their laptops, creating an atmosphere of camaraderie and bustle.

After a week of campfires and swimming, midge repellent and simple eating — though decadent — the hotel felt cartoonishly civilised. We soaked it up. There were salads and burgers in the lobby restaurant, followed by a cheese course from I. J. Mellis for pudding; powerful showers; interconnecting rooms with built-in, ship cabin bunk beds for the two eldest boys. The next morning the five of us emerged, rested and full of a hot breakfast, ready for the long drive home.