Inside the unique 15-bedroom Highland lodge for sale for less than £300,000

A 15-bedroom Highland lodge is going up for auction with a starting bid of just under £300,000.

Achnashellach Lodge in Glen Carron sits in 18-acres of woodland above Loch Dhuigaill and was built in 1870 as a hunting lodge.

It later served as accommodation for workers at the Kishorn yard and as a hotel but was more recently a private home.

It is up for sale after its elderly owner decided to move on from the property, with the lodge due up for auction next month.

Part of the property has fallen into disrepair with the house needing a considerable upgrade.

George Douglas of Future Property Auctions said the house was “not for the faint hearted”, but could make an impressive hotel or family home once again.

He said: “It was a hotel and then it was a private residence, but part of it has fallen into a bit of disrepair

“The owner was older in years and it became unmanageable and they were using it latterly just as a large family home.

“The property needs work. Any building typically needs work. If it is not being used to its full potential, a building will dilapidate relatively quickly.

“It is a potential Highland hotel or a stunning family home, a Highland retreat, if someone was to go in there with a large amount of money.

“It needs a rock star millionaire to come along and throw a lot of money at it. Hopefully someone lives in it as opposed to someone who comes in and uses it for just a couple of weeks a year.

“If you are buying that as a family home, the heating and council tax will probably cost you around £3,000 a month. So it is not for the faint hearted.”

Achnashellach Lodge is situated in Glen Carron on the A890 road between Lochcarron and Achnasheen.

The lodge was completed for William Elphinstone, 15th Lord Elphinstone, who bought the estate in 1869 to entertain hunting and shooting parties with visitors arriving on the newly extended railway line from Dingwall to Stromeferry. A private station was built close to the house and is still in use by walkers and climbers.

A succession of aristocratic owners followed.

According to accounts, during the 1930s the lodge served for a time as the residence of His Highness the Maharajah of Gaekwar of Baroda, one of the longest serving and most controversial Indian princes to reign during the British Raj.

By the 1970s it was owned by Howard Doris Engineering Ltd who created an offshore design engineering plant at Loch Kishorn to build concrete gravity-base structures for oil and gas production in the North Sea.

The yard became a huge employer as a new industrial landscape took shape and the once sparsely-populated area was suddenly home to around 3,000 workers who headed to Loch Kishorn from all over the country. They typically worked 16-hours days on two-week rotation with a pay packet of around £2,000 a week at today’s values.

Some of the workers stayed in the lodge with a series of log cabins built throughout the area to cope with demand.

By the 1980s, the lodge was sold after the company went into receivership.