Wherever I lay my hat

There are countless guesthouses around Scotland, offering bed and breakfast for weary travellers, but what are they like? Richard Goslan reports

Finding the right bed and breakfast (B&B), in the right place at just the right time, is guaranteed to give you a travelling memory which you'll hold dear for the rest of your days.

My own came in Fort William, at the end of an arduous five-day trek along an unrelentingly wet West Highland Way. As poor students at the time, we'd done the trip with the bare minimum of comfort, camping for free along the way and feeding ourselves from a mixture of unappetising meals cooked up over a primus stove.

The last day was particularly tough. It's a gruelling slog from the Kings House Hotel in Glen Coe over the Devil's Staircase, and then a long descent down to Kinlochleven. But that's not even halfway to the finishing line.

From there, you're faced with another climb out of town to get up to Lairig Mor and the interminable, exposed path leading to Glen Nevis. Add a relentless drizzle to the picture, and you can imagine how we must have looked when we finally staggered off the hill into Fort William.

Bedraggled doesn't do it justice.

Our plan was to hop straight on the bus back to Glasgow, but the last one had left for the day. The hostel at Glen Nevis was full to bursting, and our camping gear and sleeping bags were still soaked through from the previous evening.

That's when we found our B&B… Now you have to give the owner credit – here she was, faced with five young men who hadn't washed properly in almost a week, standing there in filthy boots, dripping wet and lugging huge ...

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• By : Richard Goslan
• In : Hotels
• Issue : 38
• Page : 46
• Words : 1,396