€346.80 for 1 Night
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Alladale Wilderness Reserve
€346.80/ Night
24/7 Support
Looking for help choosing or for a property we don't list? Message our Private Rates Concierge on WhatsApp for member rates and insider knowledge on the right stay
A stunning, wild 100 square kilometer wilderness reserve located deep in the heart of the Scottish Highlands, where you’re warmly welcomed and made to feel right at home.
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Award Winner 2019
Europe’s Best Apartment Hotel
Need To Know
- Three exclusive-use lodges sleeping from 2 to around 14 guests each, fully catered and staffed
- A 23,000-acre rewilding reserve in the Highlands, about an hour north of Inverness
- Alladale Lodge (grand Victorian), Eagle's Crag and Ghillie's Rest (smaller, secluded)
- Wilderness-to-table catering included; wild venison, foraged and home-grown produce
- Ranger-led hikes, fly fishing, wildlife watching, cold-water swimming, a riverside sauna
- Owned and run as a conservation reserve by custodian Paul Lister
- Closed early January to spring; reached by a 12-mile single-track road
Check in - Check out
Check in from 14:00; check out before 12:00.
We Love
- The rewilding — 23,000 acres of Highland glen under twenty years of restoration, regrowing Caledonian pinewood and peatland and bringing back native wildlife.
- The lodges — three exclusive-use, fully catered and staffed boltholes, from the grand Victorian Alladale Lodge to a restored two-person bothy deep in the glen.
- The food — wild venison from the reserve, foraged Highland produce and vegetables from the estate's own gardens, all cooked in-house and included in a stay.
- The activities — ranger-led hikes, fly fishing on the rivers and hill lochs, wildlife watching, cold-water swimming and a riverside sauna built from Scottish timber.
- The wildness — golden eagles overhead, deer at the lodge door and ancient Scots pines along a 12-mile single-track glen, an hour from Inverness yet a world away.
Key Features
Book Your Stay at Alladale Wilderness Reserve
€346.80 for 1 Night
Location
Address
Alladale Wilderness Reserve, Ardgay, Sutherland, IV24 3BS, Scotland
Travel Info
Alladale sits deep in a glen near Ardgay in Sutherland, reached by a 12-mile single-track road about an hour north of Inverness, the nearest airport and rail hub. A car or arranged transfer is essential; the North Coast 500 route runs close by.
Nearby Places
Arrive into Inverness airport (INV) and the resort is just over one hours drive North (transfer or rental)
250m
Last Updated: 2026-06-18
Expert Review
Origins
Alladale Wilderness Reserve is a 23,000-acre estate deep in the hills of Sutherland, in the heart of the Scottish Highlands, and it is something rarer than a place to stay: a working experiment in bringing a landscape back to life. Like much of the Highlands, this was once a country of dense forest and abundant wildlife before centuries of clearance and grazing stripped it back to bare hill. For the past twenty years, under its owner and custodian Paul Lister, Alladale has been quietly reversing that loss.
The work runs across the whole reserve. Hundreds of thousands of native trees — Scots pine, birch, rowan — have been planted to regrow fragments of the ancient Caledonian forest; peatlands are being restored, rivers left to run wild, and native species given room to recover, from red squirrels and raptors to the salmon that run the Carron. The estate generates its own hydro power, grows produce in aquaponic gardens, and manages its deer to supply the kitchens, so that a stay here sits lightly on the land. Lister has spoken too of a longer-term ambition to see predators such as the wolf return to fenced Highland reserves — a vision that remains contested and unrealised, but which captures the scale of the thinking.
You stay inside all this in one of three exclusive-use lodges, fully catered and staffed. Alladale Lodge is the grand one, a south-facing Victorian sporting lodge for larger groups, with a gym, sauna and snooker room; Eagle's Crag is a smaller eco lodge with open-beamed ceilings and antler chandeliers; and Ghillie's Rest is a restored bothy for two to four, secluded down the glen. The cooking is wilderness-to-table — venison, foraged Highland produce, home-grown vegetables — and the days are spent out in the reserve, on foot, on the rivers or in the riverside sauna. It is a place to stay that doubles as a place doing real good, an hour from Inverness and a world from anywhere.
Top Secret
Ask the rangers to take you out to the hides. The Badger Hide, set beside the Abhainn a' Ghlinne Mhoir river, lets you light a fire, settle in at dusk and wait for the reserve's wildlife to emerge; for early risers, the dawn-chorus walk is the best chance of golden eagles and the rarer Highland birds. Anyone planting roots can become a Pine Custodian, sponsoring native saplings that carry old Gaelic and Scots names — a small, rooted stake in the forest's return.
The Review
Alladale is, in its own words, a wilderness reserve with accommodation rather than a hotel in a wilderness — and that difference is the whole point. This is 23,000 acres of Highland glen given over to rewilding, an hour north of Inverness down a 12-mile single-track road, where you stay as a guest of the land rather than a customer of a resort. For anyone who cares about wild places, it is among the most genuinely interesting stays in Scotland.
You take a whole lodge to yourself. Alladale Lodge, the Victorian sporting house at the heart of it, feels more like a private home than a hotel — deer wander up to it at dawn, the fires are lit, and the head chef cooks wilderness-to-table dinners of estate venison and foraged produce that put most country-house kitchens to shame. The two smaller lodges, Eagle's Crag and Ghillie's Rest, trade the grandeur for seclusion further down the glen. All are fully catered and staffed, and all come with the run of the reserve: ranger-led hikes, fly fishing on rivers and hill lochs, cold-water swims, wildlife hides and a sauna built of Scottish timber by the water.
It will not suit everyone. It is remote, it is exclusive-use rather than a room-by-the-night hotel, and it closes through the depths of winter into spring. But for a family gathering, a group of friends or a celebration that wants real wilderness and a conscience to match, there is very little like it in Britain. You leave having lived inside a landscape on the mend — and, through the Pine Custodian scheme, able to leave a few trees of your own behind. That is a rare thing to be able to say of a holiday.
