The Highland Games in their public form are a spectacle of tartans and crowds, and we do send some travellers to the bigger of them — Braemar in early September, the small-field throwing, the drums and pipes. But there is a quieter version of the Highland summer we prefer, and which our returning Scotland travellers increasingly ask for.
It is the version that happens in August, on the smaller estates, at the private gatherings the old families still hold for themselves.
A private Highland stay in August centres on one of a handful of sporting estates that open to a small number of guests each year. Rooms held for a single party. A shoot and a river, if either interests you. A piper on the terrace before dinner. A gathering, on one evening, for the families of the valley — a hundred people perhaps — with a band and a raised floor and the kind of dancing that ends when the light comes back in the east.
What makes this week different from the public Games is its intimacy. You meet the estate’s shepherd, the cook, the stalker, the river’s ghillie. You are taken to places the public maps will not mark. You eat dinners in drawing rooms where the paintings are still family portraits rather than museum loans.
Outside the estate, we pair this week, usually, with a quieter second half. A private house in Wester Ross, a small hotel on the Sound of Mull, a drive up through the Sutherland country that not many travellers see.
Scotland in August is, for us, the country at its most generous. The wild is in its full summer dress, the tables are long and well-kept, and the old rhythms of the summer season — gathering, sporting, neighbour visiting — still go on, exactly as they did a hundred and fifty years ago, for anyone with the manners to be invited into them.
We think this is the real Highland Games. The trophies are smaller. The company is kinder. The week stays with you long afterward.
