Did you know that Queen Victoria came to stay at Loch Maree?

I regularly stop outside the Loch Maree Hotel to show our guests the golden royal crest that still hangs upon its wall. It recalls six nights in September 1877 when Queen Victoria stayed beside the loch with her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, and the Duchess of Roxburghe. Victoria had come to explore, sketch and paint a landscape whose reputation had already begun to spread, although her journal makes clear that even a queen received no protection from the dreadful Highland midges.

The hotel had opened only five years before the royal visit and still offers a four-poster bedroom associated with Victoria, although there is no reliable evidence that its present bed is the one in which she slept. Outside stands a great block of Torridonian sandstone carrying a Gaelic inscription commemorating the pleasure she took in visiting Loch Maree and the surrounding country. Together, the stone and the crest turn an attractive old hotel into one of the few visible reminders of a visit that helped place Wester Ross before a fashionable Victorian audience.

The most human episode happened at Kerry Bridge, beside the modern turning towards Badachro. About 250 people from Lewis had crossed the Minch from Stornoway, a journey of around three hours, for the chance to see their queen. They assembled beside the road, sang ‘God Save the Queen’ and cheered as Victoria stopped to receive them before they began the long return journey to the island. It was an extraordinary effort for a brief royal encounter, yet nothing at the bridge tells today’s traveller what happened there.

That absence is precisely why I stop and tell the story. Victoria did not create tourism around Loch Maree, because the railway, hotels and reputation of the landscape were already drawing visitors west, but her presence gave the area royal approval and carried its fame much farther. The crest and inscribed stone survive at the hotel, while the gathering at Kerry Bridge lives only through the retelling of a lovely piece of social history that North Coast Explorer brings back to life on our private tours.

To learn more, book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.