A Working House, Built for Service

This simple Highland home has been shaped by the lives lived within it — not as legend or folklore, but as memory layered over time.

The original house, still the core of Eddrachilles Hotel, was built in the early 1800s as a manse — the home provided for a parish minister of the established Church of Scotland (Presbyterian). There may have been earlier accommodations in the immediate area but the new building at Badcall and associated lands were gifted by the Duke of Sutherland as part of the reorganisation a much larger parish.

This manse was intended to serve the Eddrachillis parish, between the Kyles of Laxford and Kylesku. The parish was closely linked to Assynt and with the natural harbour in Badcall Bay was widely used. As a consequence, the population centre around Badcall outstripped Scourie at the end of the eighteenth century. The position immediately above the east side point of Badcall Bay, facing Assynt and close to the harbour, was chosen for this new statement of the Church’s presence.

A manse formed part of the established infrastructure of the parish, alongside church and school. In Presbyterian Scotland, a manse was never intended to be a private retreat. It was a working household, expected to support the minister’s pastoral duties to congregation and community alike. It was also the place where key sacraments in simple ceremonies might be performed rather than in the Church, baptisms and weddings.

  • Attached to the house was a glebe: land legally assigned to the parish to help sustain the minister and his family. In practical terms this made the manse a small working holding, with gardens, pasture, and outbuildings managed either by the household itself or by a grieve. The arrangement reflected an expectation that the minister’s life would be rooted in the daily rhythms of the place he served.

    At Eddrachillis the glebe was larger than many, a necessity in a remote parish where much of the land was rough grazing rather than fertile ground. The holding included ground close to the house and, unusually, extended into the bay itself with one of the islands.

    This was not a commercial farm, but it required steady management and labour, reinforcing the manse’s role as a centre of work as well as residence.

    Taken together, house and glebe made the manse a place of service rather than comfort alone — a household shaped by responsibility, endurance, and close connection to its landscape.

“The house remained a working centre of parish life — shaped by duty, endurance, and adaptation rather than comfort alone.”

Lives Lived Here

Life in a nineteenth-century Highland manse was organised around work as much as worship. At the manse for Eddrachilles parish, the household combined domestic life, pastoral duty, and the management of the glebe. The manse functioning as a semi-public place of residence rather than a private home.

The glebe supported a mixed pattern of cultivation and grazing typical of the Highlands: enough arable ground and livestock to sustain the household, with labour shared between family members, servants, and hired hands. This work supplemented the stipend paid by the parish, and tied the rhythms of the manse closely to season and weather. The minister might inspect stock or fields as readily as he prepared sermons or correspondence. However, pastoral visiting often required long journeys across a scattered parish and much of the work routinely fell to others.

Change Beyond the Walls

From the start, the nineteenth century brought profound change to Highland society, and Eddrachilles was shaped by its aftermath. Across Scotland, estate “Improvement” reorganised landholding and agriculture in pursuit of greater efficiency. Many families moved to the new and growing cities to take up work provided by industrialisation.

In the Highlands, this process was harsher than elsewhere. Following the destruction of the clan system after the failure of the 1745-46 Jacobite rebellion, landowners in the early 1800s moved swiftly to “clear” the glens of homes and small holdings to introduce sheep . Sutherland saw some of the most brutal, e.g. the infamous Patrick Sellar and the fire raising of 1814.

Displaced families moved to coastal settlements such as Scourie on the west coast or Helmsdale on the east. In the decades that followed, the programme of improvements continued, but sadly not to the benefit of the displaced.

  • In Northwest Sutherland, from 1837 the implementation was directed from Scourie Lodge, where the Duke of Sutherland’s factor, Evander McIver, was based. Although not part of the notorious burnings, his reputation is forever associated with unrelenting consolidation of land for new agriculture to the benefit of the landowner and for masterminding the mass emigration that followed. 

    Eddrachillis itself was affected, but not emptied. Parish population peaked in the mid-nineteenth century and then declined gradually over the decades that followed, as emigration and reorganisation reduced numbers rather than removing communities wholesale. The manse was not an instrument of clearance, but it stood within a parish adapting to long-term change rather than sudden abandonment.

War, Ownership, and a Turning Point (First World War)

In the years following the First World War, the house passed from ecclesiastical use into private ownership, marking a decisive change in its life. In the early 1920s it was purchased by Lt Col Thomas Wilkinson Cuthbert, a gentleman estate manager by profession and a Territorial Army officer — a form of voluntary service widely taken up by men of his background in the years before the war.

  • t the outbreak of war in 1914, Cuthbert was among the first to be called into active service with the Seaforth Highlanders. Like many Territorial officers, his responsibilities expanded rapidly under the pressures of early combat, and the experience marked him permanently.

    His decision to settle at Eddrachilles in the post-war years brought the house into a new chapter: no longer a manse, but a private home shaped by stewardship and memory. Alongside managing the estate, he worked to preserve the records and memorials of his battalion, ensuring that its service and losses were not forgotten.

    Cuthbert died in 1936 and is buried here, overlooking the sea. His grave lies within the woodland grounds, and his presence is still acknowledged in the naming of The Colonel’s Dell and The Colonel’s Lounge — a continuity of remembrance rather than a monument.

Second World War in Northwest Sutherland

During the Second World War, the West Highlands played a vital but role in the national war effort. Not only was much of the coastline subject to restricted access, and the surrounding waters and hills were used for training and preparation, for some of the Allies’ most daring ad.

The former manse was by then firmly a family home, shaped by extended kinship rather than public function. Like many houses in remote areas, it offered refuge as well as continuity. Some children were evacuated here from towns and cities, while rationing was softened by rural living and access to land. Everyday life continued alongside wartime precautions, and the parish learned, as many did, to see much and say little.

  • In the years immediately after the war, with ownership held in trust and no direct heir, the house passed through a period of transition. For a short time the former manse and associated buildings operated as a Youth Hostel, a chapter still remembered by some former visitors and their families. By the later 1950s the trust was broken and the property sold, entering a new phase as a private family home, gently farmed and seasonally let, and fully returning to civilian domestic life.

Roads, Access, and a New Chapter

For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, access to this part of north-west Sutherland depended on a combination of narrow single-track roads and the ferry crossing at Kylesku. These routes were adequate for local movement, but they limited wider travel and made the area feel distant, even within the Highlands.

That began to change in the later twentieth century. From the 1970s onwards, a programme of road improvements gradually created a continuous north–south route along the west side of Sutherland and Assynt. The replacement of older, winding roads and the eventual construction of the Kylesku Bridge in the early 1980s removed the final bottleneck, transforming access to the region

  • For Badcall, this shift proved decisive. During the road works, the house accommodated engineers involved in the project, and the income from that period enabled a single, definitive transformation. In the early 1980s, a sympathetic extension was built, adding eight new ensuite bedrooms and allowing the house to operate fully as a small hotel rather than a seasonal letting. A sun lounge followed later, extending the building’s relationship with its setting.

    In the early twenty-first century, the Wood family retired from the hotel business, and the former manse — by then firmly established as a hotel — was sold with a small area of surrounding woodland. The walled garden and remaining glebe land were retained separately and later sold in 2013. The present setting reflects these later changes: a historic house adapted for hospitality, set within its immediate landscape rather than the wider agricultural holding that once sustained it.

    Improved access did not alter the character of the place overnight, but it changed what was possible. A house shaped by centuries of service and domestic life entered a new phase of hospitality, suited to a landscape now open to those able to reach it.