Rocklee, Ballachulish: a B&B on the old goods yard, and the best host we have ever had

The best host we have ever had. There, said in the first line, and after all these years staying in other people’s houses across a dozen countries, we do not even feel like softening it.

Jo runs Rocklee on her own, in Ballachulish, a village sitting on the shore of Loch Leven at the foot of Glencoe. We spent two nights there in August, and we left with the slightly odd feeling of having been taken in by someone rather than of having slept somewhere. It sounds like a small distinction. It is the whole of the difference.

One point of geography before we go on, because half the internet files Rocklee under Glencoe: the B&B is in Ballachulish, and Glencoe village is a few minutes further down the road. It changes nothing about the view. It only changes what you put in the satnav.

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A house standing on the old goods yard

Jo’s address is Old Railway Goods Yard. We took it at first for a house name chosen by somebody fond of trains, then we looked it up, and no, it is perfectly literal.

Ballachulish station opened on 24 August 1903 at East Laroch, right beside the slate quarries, its goods yard on the north side, narrow gauge tracks running down from the quarries to the wagons. The line closed in 1966, the passenger building became the village GP surgery in the early nineties, and houses went up across the station site. Jo’s is one of them.

And the slate here is not a picturesque detail. They have been getting it out of this village since 1693, the year after the massacre, which needs no introduction from us and which happened about a mile and a half up the road. By the early twentieth century six hundred men were producing twenty-six million slates a year, shipped out across Loch Leven to England, Ireland and America. If you have ever looked up at a tenement roof in Glasgow or a rooftop in Edinburgh, there is a fair chance you have already seen this village. So when you look at the slate roof from the upstairs window, you are looking at the economic history of the place.

The sitting room, and the window that takes the whole wall

We thought we were arriving at a B&B room. We found ourselves in a flat. Jo has converted three spaces in her house for guests: one room on the ground floor, and two upstairs facing each other. Ours was the big one at the top, with a sitting room, a separate bedroom and a bathroom. The two upstairs can be booked together, which gives a family or a group the run of the whole floor.

The sitting room looks out on Loch Leven through a window that opens up the wall. In front of the house a broad green slope runs down towards the water, and it is not unusual to find Highland cattle grazing on it. One detail had us both laughing: there is a telly installed directly beside that window. We never once switched it on. We already had the best telly in the house, and it changed programme on its own as the hours went by.

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On the decoration, you can tell every detail has been considered. The room works in pastel greens, a good fifty shades of them if you are counting, with a carpet that makes you want to sit on the floor like a child, and a wooden rocking chair set by the window. You can picture it. All it needs is rain outside, and in Scotland that sorts itself out.

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The bedroom, the bedding and the shower

There is not much to say about the bed except that we slept extremely well both nights. The bedding is plainly one of the strengths of the house, and it is the sort of thing you notice all the more when you have been moving from one place to the next for weeks.

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The bathroom is not large, but the shower is roomy and genuinely good, with Highland Soap Co bars set on the basin. And more broadly, the whole thing is spotless. With this much detail in the decoration, three spaces to turn round and guests coming and going, we could reasonably have found one neglected corner. We did not find one.

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And then there is the print on the wall, Achmelvich Bay. It took us three seconds to place it: we went through there on our first Scottish trip, over towards Lochinver. You have seen the photographs, and if you are anything like us you assumed somebody had pushed the colour. They had not. Finding it above a bed four years later does something to you.

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Jo, and the whisky with honey in it

I have to tell this part, because it is the part that turned the stay round. I arrived at Jo’s with a stinking cold and had a rough night of it, with a good deal of fever.

Jo sorted us out with medicine and cough syrup, and then made me a whisky with honey and a drop of water. You will have your own name for that, and very probably your own version of it. We will call it fighting fire with fire, and honestly, at the time, it did rather more for me than the syrup. Beyond the anecdote, what stays with us is that she took that much trouble while obviously having plenty else to be getting on with.

Another example, in a far less romantic register: we needed to do some washing. We asked, she said yes at once, and she did the washing and the drying herself. That is Rocklee, in one go.

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Running a house to this standard is a full-time job, and Jo makes no secret of it. She explained that one-night stays had become too much to manage given everything that has to happen between guests, and that Rocklee now takes a two-night minimum. Seeing the state of the rooms and the care that goes into each arrival, the decision explains itself.

The hospitality tray, the mini-fridge and the small touches

There is everything you need for a tea or a coffee at any hour, a properly stocked hospitality tray, and a mini-fridge. One thoroughly lived-in remark about the Scottish summer: given the temperatures during our stay, we had little use for a fridge, the window on the latch was already doing the job.

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Breakfast, exactly what we needed

This is probably not the breakfast for anyone who has come for a full Scottish. For us, after several days of pub meals, chips and sauces, even trying to balance it out with soup, and with one of us ill, it was precisely the right thing.

We made ourselves bowls of Scottish granola with honeyed yoghurt and berries: raspberries, brambles and strawberries. And the surprise was the fruit, which had an enormous amount of flavour. We had not expected berries like that in Scotland, and there they were. The verdict is straightforward: it was superb.

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There is also the basket of breads and bagels, the toaster, the jams, the honey, the orange juice, in short everything you need to put a morning together according to mood. And a fruit-patterned tablecloth which, for reasons we cannot entirely account for, is part of the character of the house.

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Tom and Tommy, the other residents

We have a cat of our own, Vasco, so this landed with us: Jo is not alone at Rocklee, she lives with Tom and Tommy, her two cats. Tommy was especially forward with us, turning up in the morning for his share of the fuss as though he were formally on the welcome party.

He is a handsome white and ginger cat, on the stocky side, and you can tell he is built for a Scottish winter. He has a small half-circle of ginger fur under his mouth that leaves him permanently looking pleased. None of which changes the comfort of a room, and all of which changes the feeling of being taken into a lived-in house rather than an establishment.

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The one thing to know before you book

If we really must find a limit to Rocklee, it is not the house but where it sits, and above all what you have come for. This is a place for taking yourself out of things, for being quiet by the loch, very nearly a retreat. You are not in the back of beyond, but you are close enough that it is worth knowing before you hit book.

In practice, dinner means fifteen to twenty minutes in the car to have any choice, and in high season that can get awkward: one evening it took us the better part of an hour to find a table, the first two places being full. None of which is Jo’s doing. It is the exact price of the quiet and the view that make the place what it is.

On distances it is an excellent base: Glencoe five minutes, Fort William half an hour. And that convenience is more recent than it looks. Before the Ballachulish bridge opened on 23 December 1975 it was the ferry, with the queue that came with it in season, or nineteen miles round by Kinlochleven to get to the other side of a loch you could see across. If you are old enough to have sat in that queue, you will know exactly what the bridge was worth.

Practical information

We looked for the flaw, genuinely. Between the view, the space, the bedding, the housekeeping, the breakfast and Jo herself, we did not find one, and we drove off saying we should have booked a third night.