On a fine August day in 1956, the Royal Yacht Britannia nosed quietly into Loch Rodel and dropped anchor. 

From it, a little later, emerged the slender figure of the young Queen Elizabeth 11 and her husband Prince Philip. As part of a tour of the Hebrides, they had decided to include a visit to Rodel.   They were not the first distinguished visitors.

At the south-eastern tip of the Isle of Harris, among the most westerly of the Western Isles, Rodel is as ancient a place as any in Scotland.  Monarchs and minstrels; poets and painters; the seriously great, the generally good and the frankly raffish, all have found their way to this, the original main port and capital of the island.

It is a place of soft air and ever-changing beauty; of clouds and hills and wheeling birds and enormous skies, where the heartbeat settles to a slow rhythm and a deep sense of peace washes in, as slowly and inevitably as the tide in the statuesque harbour, just below the house.