Summer Isles Hotel - Achiltibuie

The long and winding single-track road that brings visitors into the scattered hamlet of Achiltibuie is a wonderful prelude to the Summer Isles Hotel and there are jaw-dropping views over the sea to the eponymous Summer Isles themselves. All around are vast expanses of the remote, dramatic, weather-beaten Highlands.

Since the late 1960s, the hotel was lovingly run by various members of the Irvine family, but they sold the place to Terry and Irina Mackay in March 2008. The new incumbents are determined to maintain the hotel's unique style and special character.

Chef Chris Firth-Bernard remains in the kitchen, and he makes proper use of home-grown supplies as well as locally landed seafood and game from the moors. Lunch is a warm up (with plates of seafood as the mainstay) and dinner is the main event: expect a daily five-course menu with no choice until the heavily laden sweet trolley and cheeses come around.

A typical meal might begin with a filo parcel of monkfish tails with tamarind sauce, before freshly landed langoustines and spiny lobsters served in their shells with hollandaise. For main course you might be offered roast rib of Aberdeen Angus beef with wild mushrooms and red onions in red wine, and the choice of desserts might include banana flan or dark chocolate roulade with strawberries. The scintillating 400-bin wine list goes boldly into the rarified regions of France and the New World – and comes away with ample treasures at realistic prices.