Large lodges for groups

The word lodge covers a lot. On this site a lodge is a house that calls itself one, and there are 19 of them sleeping 10 or more: six in the Highlands, two each in the Cairngorms, Perthshire and the Lake District, and single houses in Argyll, Skye, Dumfries and Galloway, Northumberland, Derbyshire, Herefordshire and Devon. Most are the first kind of lodge: stone, Victorian or older, built for a shooting or fishing estate, with a boot room, a drying room, a billiard table and a long table in a panelled dining room.

What a Highland lodge is like

They were built to house a party of twelve for a fortnight in August, which makes them close to ideal for a modern group of the same size. Expect five to eight bedrooms, often with a run of twin rooms on the top floor that were once for staff and are now for teenagers, a kitchen that has been rebuilt at least once since the 1950s, and open fires or a wood burner in the main rooms. They are rarely on a road: a mile of track is normal and a four-wheel drive is helpful in winter.

What they are not is slick. Bathrooms are shared more than in a new barn conversion, the broadband can be patchy, and the nearest shop is a drive. Groups that want a hot tub and a games console should look at the Lake District and Perthshire houses first, where a lodge is more likely to be a well-built modern house than an estate building.

Sleeps and prices

The lodges here sleep from 10 to 20. The biggest are a 20-bed lodge in Northumberland, an 18-bed house on Skye and 16-bed lodges in the Highlands and the Cairngorms; the typical lodge sleeps 10 to 12 with five or six bedrooms. Low-season weeks start at about £1,000 for a 10-bed lodge in Devon and £1,260 for one on the Kyles of Bute, and run to £4,000 to £5,000 for the biggest places in the Cairngorms, on Skye and in Northumberland. Per head that is about £100 to £300 a week, in line with the rest of the site, with the Perthshire and Highland houses at the cheaper end.

The sporting lodges have a season of their own: August and September can be let to shooting parties at a different rate, or not at all, so for a group holiday look at June and July or at autumn half term onwards.

Scotland for a big group

Scotland is where most people searching for lodges end up, and the choice is wider than the lodge label suggests. There are 49 houses sleeping 10 or more across the Highlands, Cairngorms, Perthshire, Argyll, Fife, the Borders, Dumfries and Galloway, Skye and Loch Lomond, including farmhouses, a castle wing and a 32-bed Georgian mansion. Fourteen of them have a hot tub and seven take dogs.

For a group driving from England, Dumfries and Galloway and the Borders are two hours from Carlisle and often cheaper than the Highlands for the same size of house. Perthshire is 90 minutes from Edinburgh and Glasgow, which makes it the practical choice for a mixed group with people flying in. The Highlands proper, and Skye, are a day’s travel for most, which is fine for a week and hard for a weekend.

Lodge or farmhouse?

If the group wants space, land, a fire and a long table, a lodge. If the group wants three bathrooms per floor, underfloor heating and a hot tub on a deck, a converted barn or a modern house will do it better at the same price. The lodges on this site win on setting; the barn conversions win on fittings. Most groups of 12 would be happy in either, so decide on the drive and the dates first.

Questions to ask before you book

How far is the house from a tarmac road, and is the track passable in a normal car in January. Is wood for the fires included. Is the heating oil or electric, and is it metered. How many bathrooms are en suite, and how many are shared by the top floor. Is there mobile signal, and which network. And, for the sporting estates, is the house let to a shooting party in the weeks either side of yours, because the dogs, guns and 6 am starts affect the neighbours.

The row below is every lodge type house in the data today, biggest first. The region pages have the farmhouses and barns next to them.