Five, and no two the same

The smallest of the steading cottages and the one people ask for again. A single room under the slates with the bed in the gable, a stove that takes a log too big for it, and a window seat deep enough to sleep a dog. The kitchen is four steps long. In October the sun comes through that window until nearly four and the room holds the heat till morning.

Two bedrooms at either end of a long kitchen, which is the whole point of the plan: children at one gable, adults at the other, a table for six in between. The table came out of the schoolhouse at Achnacarry and has the initials to prove it. Best cottage for a week of weather, because there is somewhere to be.

The cattle byre, re-roofed in 2019, with the feed passage left as a corridor and the original tie rings still in the stone. Three bedrooms, a boot room that takes eight pairs and dries them by morning, and the only bath on the croft — cast iron, under a skylight. Two families take this one and split the week.

Turned away from the water, which sounds like a fault and isn't: the porch looks straight up the corrie and gets the last light half an hour after the others have lost it. Two bedrooms, a good armchair each side of the stove, and a hook by the door for the binoculars we leave in every cottage.

Half a mile along the shore, no road to the door. You park at the steading and walk the last four hundred yards with your bags — we'll take the heavy box up on the quad if you ask. Solar light, a woodstove, water from the burn through a filter, and a composting loo in its own small building. Nobody books this by accident.