The Coll Hotel

From material kindly supplied by Bunty Kennedy, the Dickinsons, Richard Pilbrow and Alastair Oliphant

Until about a hundred years ago the Coll Hotel was a fairly "rude hostelrie", but in the 1880s 'extensive repairs and alterations' were carried out and the new proprietor, Neil McKinnon, who took over from one Donald Crawford in 1890, advertised terms of 7/6d per day 'including bed, board, attendance and liberty of fishing.' Sounds a pretty good bargain, but there must have been problems (including a bad fire in 1904) for the establishment changed hands five more times in the period before World War I.

Withing span of living memory the hotel has been run by the MacQuarries, the Jardines and the Oliphants. During the first of these periods guests were almost entirely shootin' people in search of grouse, partridge and snipe (they hired local ghillies for 5/- a day) and fishing' parties - there was rumoured to be a secret trout filled lochan at the East End known only the the initiated. These parties returned loyally year after year even though the hotel wasn't very well equipped with "all mod. cons." There was one bathroom and four/five  bedrooms; light and heat came from open fires, paraffin lamps, a legendary Bungalow Belle stove - and one lamp was kept burning as a navigational guide every night in the round window that overlooked the bay. The public bar was a tin lean-to behind the hotel with a long table an trestle seats set on an earthen floor with steps leading to it down which customers tended to fall.

Nevertheless, the hotel certainly offered visiting mainlanders a different experience, as Elsie and Tom Dickinson, who spent their honeymoon there in 1956, remember: "We were met off the ferry by Hector MacQuarrie's roomy Austin taxis with grand leather upholstery" and, owing to the indisposition of Mrs MacQuarrie, they were soon presssed into service in the bar and kitchen. A highlight of their stay was the fearful row that followed when "Ian McKenzie's wild goats which roamed all over the place" chewed up a line of washing that Bunty Kennedy (who then worked there) had hung to dry. But food was good and very plentiful (breakfast, lunch, tea, supper and a late-night snack), with home-baked bread and scones, freshly-caught fish and rabbit, new laid eggs, fresh milk and cream. And at weekends, "the country came to town" and the place resounded to the sound of music and sometimes human voices in full throttle - an all-male choir in those days for the island women did not frequent the bar!

The Jardines, who were the first actual owners (rather than tenants) came originally from Rhodesia and Guy Jardine was a colourful and much-liked figure on the local scene. Among their many satisfied guests were Richard and Vickie Pilbrow, almost the first of that now-familiar breed of cottage-owning summer-swallows. The Pilbrows originally came to the hotel because of "an ambiguous reference to it in the Good Food Guide: 'This hotel serves remarkable home cooking. It is recommended, but it is so far away that no-one has ever seconded the recommendation'." This was enough, as Richard Pilbrow comments, ". . . to powerfuIly whet imagination and appetite." He adds: "Jean was a superb cook. Every meal was a revelation. Simple, beautifuIly cooked and presented, and just surprising. Guy was. . . Guy. Irrepressible and a great host. Each night in the bar there were wonderful frenzied arguments with Angus the Tailor. All may have been 'colour' for the Sassenachs, except you knew it wasn't just a great camaraderie."

In 1963 the Oliphants and Petries (incomers with Scottish connections) who first came to the island on a joint family holiday, purchased the hotel; the former bought out the latter two years later and have owned it ever since. Shirley and Alastair Oliphant worked hard - the first job being the installation of a generator to provide electricity (it helped that Alastair was a trained electrical engineer). Then the next door building, which, says Alastair, "had been a steading with horse-stalls downstairs and a hay-loft with trapdoor above," was converted into a dwelling house; an extension with more bedrooms and bathrooms was completed in 1968, "The materials being brought in by specially chartered puffer which everyone helped to unload." Adds Alastair, "Boats left about seven a.m. for the mainland in those days, and there were an awful lot of early risings to get trays of tea and biscuits served to departing guests."

The hotel has had further additions and sprucings-up since then; meat is kept in freezers instead of brine; milk comes from Glasgow; there's television in the lounge bar and central heating in the bedrooms. . .

Editor's Note: But I have a soft spot for that front bathroom with its huge wood-sided bath and brass taps that has been there for many a year, where one can look over the bay and imagine those distant stormy nights when the oil lamp shone from the long-gone round window as a signal to mariners that they were approaching the good old Isle of Coll.

P.B.