Guests apologise to us for the weather. They arrive after four hours of driving, look at the cloud sitting on the hill, and say something regretful about their luck, as though they had booked it themselves and chosen badly.
It is a strange habit and a very British one. It also misunderstands what a week here is.
Weather is not the holiday
A stay planned entirely around sunshine is a stay planned around something nobody controls. In Highland Perthshire it is also a stay planned around something that will not happen consistently for seven consecutive days at any point in recorded history.
What can be planned around is shelter. Whether the building you have booked is somewhere you would willingly spend a wet Tuesday, or somewhere you tolerate between excursions. That distinction accounts for most of the difference between a good week here and a disappointing one, and it has nothing to do with the forecast.
The test is simple enough. Is there a room worth sitting in when it is raining. Is the kitchen the sort you would cook a proper meal in rather than assemble a sandwich in. Is there enough space that seven people are not obliged to be sociable at the same moment. Somewhere to put wet boots that is not the middle of the floor.
Get those right and the weather becomes scenery rather than a problem.
What the rain is actually for
The falls are better in rain. This is not consolation, it is drainage — the burns above Aberfeldy respond quickly, and a gorge that is pleasant in a dry August is genuinely worth the walk after two days of weather. The same is true of most of the water in this part of Perthshire.
Cloud on Schiehallion means you should not be on Schiehallion. It does not mean the day is spoiled; it means the day is a low one, which is what the glens and the woods and the distilleries are for. The hill will be there on Thursday.
And the light after rain in this landscape does something that photographs do not adequately record, which is that everything becomes briefly and improbably clear — the far side of the glen sharpens, the colours saturate, and it lasts about twenty minutes. You have to be outside to catch it, which means having gone out in weather that did not obviously invite it.
The practical position
Bring boots that are actually waterproof, not boots that were waterproof in 2019. Bring a second pair. Bring a coat with a hood, since umbrellas are ornamental in wind.
Then stop consulting the forecast. It will be wrong, and checking it four times a day converts a holiday into a vigil.
The Highlands are not somewhere you visit when conditions are favourable. They are somewhere you go, and the conditions are part of what you went for. The people who enjoy this place most are, almost without exception, the ones who stopped negotiating with the sky.
There is more on the lodge itself, including the practical business of drying boots, on our lodge, and more on what suits a low day on things to do.