Article of the Week - 12th March '05

The Great Traditional Scottish Hotel

Visitors to Scotland who pre-book their hotels often miss out on one of the great treats of that country; the Great Scottish Traditional Hotel.

The modern hotels that any self-respecting travel agent will install his customers into have everything going for them from the smiling receptionist to the warm, comfortable custom built rooms with up-to-date en-suite facilities --- and they have the welcoming fruit bowl, coffee and tea and biscuits, a clutter of information leaflets, and the obligatory courtesy shower soaps and shampoos.

All as you would expect --- but those who stay only thus do not ken of the joys they are missing.

The Great Scottish Traditional Hotel is rarer these days; but still can be found somewhere in most towns and cities. Like the crocodile is a left-over from the days when its cousins, the dinosaurs, ruled the world, so the great Scottish traditional hotel stands proud; as unaware as the crocodile of what has happened in hotel evolution and that it remains a unique and lingering relic of grander days.

If you are very lucky, when you arrive at one of these GSTHs there will be no one on reception. You push the bell; you do not hear a sound and assume you have not pushed the bell properly. You push again. A man pops up from beneath the counter and you read in his face his disdain for what he takes as your impetuosity. Forever you will be tagged as an all too impatient foreigner.

‘Yes, can I help you,’ he drawls in exaggeratedly polite tones.

You want a double room for the night for yourself and your wife. He does not reply but turns and pulls out a massive and dusty book, which he begins to look up by running his finger down its columns.

‘We have two available,’ he says untruthfully (they are only half full but he wants you to realise how lucky you are to get a room), ‘The one on the second floor is slightly smaller but has a sea view. The other is larger but is on the top floor.’

You tell him it does not matter. You simply want a room for the night. He looks at you as if to say, ‘Can’t you make up your mind.’

‘We’ll take the sea view,’ says the wife stepping in and looking at you and also meaning, ‘Can’t you make up your mind.’

The man (receptionist, owner? You never find out. You never see him again) then gives you a massive key attached to a massive key ring. ‘You go up the second stairs to the top. Then it’s first right, second left and straight on to the end of the corridor. Turn right and through the swing doors.’

If you are very lucky as I once was, you will have the key to room twenty, reach the top of the stairs and find room numbers ten to nineteen pointing one way and twenty-one to thirty pointing the other. Assuming twenty was, therefore, straight ahead I soon ended up in the broom cupboard.

You will, eventually and more by luck, find your room though and, note, the swing doors, which are outside it, always creak lustily when anyone passes through them. You will be surprised how many nocturnal passing throughs there can be in such an hotel.

Anyway, you’ve reached your room and it is even smaller than the man at reception suggested. It can hardly hold one never mind two but, still, it is only for the night. The central heating proves impossible to turn off or to control and you are then the only people in a chill Scottish night sleeping with the window wide open (opening the window took some figuring out as well). The central heating plays musical tunes as does the rest of the plumbing. The flushes that go off in sequence around you resonate for long minutes at a time. In fact, the only flush that does not is yours which proves obdurate; you may even end up with the handle in your hand. The bath in the en-suite (the en-suite having been hastily added to the room by banging down a large cupboard and putting up plywood partitioning) has not been used since Victorian times as the lime green colouring indicates and the shower has two settings, far too hot and freezing cold. Its volume obligingly fluctuates in response to the water demands of your fellow guests.

Dinner will cheer you up though. You make your way into the grand dining room. This is your first inkling that the hotel is not as full as the man at reception made out. The only others eating are an old couple who have always come to the hotel since its opening in the time of Dickens. You look through the menu and select the lentil soup only to be told it’s off. You settle for the broth -- it is the only soup on. It comes in a large silver tureen (actually electro-plated nickel silver, but near enough) and you have an outsized spoon to sup it with.

The food is actually good in these hotels though. It is an advantage that they have not as yet discovered pre-prepared, deep-frozen meals nor the monetary savings portion control brings. The outsize silver knives are difficult to weald in spreading butter and you should never have chosen the steak but you enjoy it when finally you get into it --- sensibly the wife has asked for a steak knife which magically appears for her). Even the fact that the teapot (its lid never fits) is artfully designed to pour more on the tablecloth than into the cup is a sheer joy.

Breakfast is a similar struggle; you wonder who last fingered the open marmalade and butter. But the bacon is good and the eggs fresh. The toast is also good when you finally crack how to get it out of its rack. And it is only in your imagination that the stately waiter is thinking, ’Messy foreigners. Don’t they know how to eat?’ as the tea and crumbs spread over the cloth.

Ach, but you are in Scotland and even the rain is special as you step outside still dazed that the girl at the desk that made such a mess of your bill could ask if you enjoyed your stay. You find, to your surprise, that you did. You have had an experience; the Great Scottish Traditional Hotel.

Only available in Scotland to exceptionally lucky people.

Linked to the Great Scottish Traditional Hotel is the Great Scottish Traditional High Tea.

This meal is unique to Scotland and has as much claim to be a genuine Scottish innovation as the haggis or that game where misguided people try and hit a small white ball around fields. The high tea came about in Scotland because, in the good old days, many had to rise early for work and, consequently, their hours were skewered. Breakfast was early and then, as the day was darkening and not much more could be done, hungry workers ate their main meal of the day around 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

‘High’ was the term used to denote that the meal was being eaten at the main table and not at any small side table which might have been used for breakfast or a drink of tea. High tea was intended to be the main meal of the day in many houses in Scotland. In this it varied from the English high tea which is credited to Anna, Duchess of Bedford, as the creator, who claimed she suffered from ’a sinking feeling’ around late afternoon and started the fashion of snacking on tea, sandwiches and cakes.

Today, when you can get it, the Great Scottish Traditional High Tea offers better value than the later ’dinner’ with much the same food available but, if truly traditional, not served in such a fancy manner

(nay Nouvelle Cuisine nonsense here). It starts with continuous tea and toast well supplied with butter and the main course can be steak pie or fish or bacon and eggs; then follows a mixture of scones, crumpets and fancy cakes -- enough to delight a Billy Bunter or a Tracy Tupman. Of course, the teapots must all be heavy and unwieldy and you will need a sufficiency of table napkins. Avoid, where possible, those modern hotels and hostelries offering a ’traditional’ Scottish High Tea. They are generally portion-controlled places run from without Scotland and four squares of a toast and one stodgy scone is your lot. Some even have haggis on the menu under the mistaken believe that this is a traditional Scottish dish. It may be but it has no place in the traditional Scottish High Tea.

Do come and try it -- you’ll even learn to love the rain; and when you do get a good day in Scotland...