Mature Flâneur

In Kylesku, a Dream Come True

Home of Scotland’s highest waterfall

The tiny white building center left is the Kylesku Hotel and Restaurant. Best food in town…well, the only place for miles. All photos by Tim Ward

Our trip to Scotland is all about making dreams come true. Teresa (the lassie I love so much I married her) and I have driven through the rugged Highlands five previous summers (pre-Covid), but always for a few short weeks at a time. Too often, we set agendas that were too ambitious and did not give us enough time to linger in special places we discovered along the way. Kylesku was one such place.

We had stopped there for lunch every time we passed through on earlier trips, but never stayed over to explore Loch Glencoul, which laps against Kylesku’s shore — a vast, blue, sea loch, bounded by steep, gray-green hills. Kylesku (pronounced “Kyle-skew”) is not a town, not even a village; it’s just the site of an old dock for the ferry that used to cross the narrowest part of the loch, with a hotel-restaurant and a gift shop beside it (see photos above and below). Teresa had tried to book it for many years, but there was never a vacancy and there are only 12 rooms. This year we got lucky!

The loch-side Kylesku Hotel and Restaurant

For decades that ferry crossing made possible the only southern land route…