Despite not having been away on holiday this year, Lorna and I have enjoyed lunching at a number of inviting hotels throughout 2024.

While she was looking through her photographs of the year, Lorna discovered we had visited more than a dozen hotels at time of writing, several of them more than once. Including all of them in one blog post would make for rather a long article, so they’re being described in two parts. This post, Part One, features hotels visited between January and June 2024. Part Two will cover July to December.

Our first hotel of the year (and our second most visited) was Dunkeld House Hotel.

It was a cold and frosty day in early January, and the River Tay was mistily atmospheric.

I was glad to get indoors and warm up before removing my outer garments.

In February we visited a hotel we’d never been to before: Rufflets, near St Andrews.

Here I am, eagerly awaiting delivery of some delicious soup at Rufflets.

I think it was mushroom soup I had. It came with bread and a little pat of cultured butter from the Edinburgh Butter Company, ready to be spread with a delightful wooden knife.

The vegetarian main course was mushroom risotto, an offering Lorna is not especially fond of, but she was intrigued to try it since it contained sweetcorn as well as mushrooms. Happily, she declared it tasty, and the sweetcorn an excellent addition.

After the risotto Lorna felt too full for dessert, but I opted for a chocolate sponge with salted caramel sauce and ice cream. It was served with a long and very thin stick of spun sugar.

After our meal, we moved to more comfortable seats in a lounge area to enjoy hot beverages.

There was a welcoming fire in the hearth. We sat there for a while, relaxing happily.

February also saw us visiting Ballathie House Hotel, near where we live in Blairgowrie (more on that one later) and the Dakota Hotel at South Queensferry.

It wasn’t our first visit to the Dakota Hotel, although it’s not somewhere we’ve been to very often.

Lorna’s outstanding memory of the Dakota is that it once served up the best gnocchi she’s ever had. It wasn’t on the menu on this occasion, and she opted for two vegetarian starters instead of a main course.

I had the French onion soup, which was so large and filling I had no room for pudding. It was delicious but quite a challenge to eat, being entirely covered with a thick slab of melted cheese.

For Christmas 2023, Lorna and I gave each other luncheon vouchers for the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh. In late March we drove south to our home town to spend them.

The lunch was a 3 course set menu, and the starters were sizeable. Lorna’s starter was, in fact, larger than her main course.

We both very much enjoyed our starters, and were also delighted by the main courses.

We were quite full by the time it came to puddings, but in for a penny in for a pound.

After finishing our three courses, we rolled ourselves into the bar for tea and coffee, which was served with excellent shortbread we barely had room for.

Lorna came back from a visit to the facilities joyfully reporting that the flamboyant sinks she remembered from visiting the Balmoral many years ago were still in evidence.

At the end of April we made one of several visits to our most frequented hotel of the year, Ballathie House Hotel, near Blairgowrie.

We like Ballathie for many reasons, including its proximity to where we live (a 15 minute drive away), its beautiful grounds and magnificent riverside setting with long, tree-lined drive, the splendid peacefulness of the drawing room where they serve weekday lunches, the delicious soup and sandwich offering they provide from Monday to Friday, the very pleasant ambience and the excellent, welcoming staff. In short, we’re always happy to pay it a visit.

The weekday lunch menu is quite limited, with one soup on offer, several sandwich options, a dessert of the day, and a cream tea available. We often settle for soup followed by a cream tea, which we find fills us up nicely. The cream tea comes with tea or coffee, superb home-made fruit scones, a plentiful supply of jam and cream, and two shortbread biscuits.

April is my birthday month, and in 2024 I celebrated the achievement of reaching 95 years old. This visit to Ballathie took place on the day itself, but we also celebrated the milestone in early May with other family members.

On 5 May we met up with my son Donald and his partner Gail, and their two children, James and Sam, at Gleneagles, near Auchterarder. Lorna forgot to take photographs during this occasion, but after our lunch and before we parted, Gail remembered to get a selfie shot using her phone camera. Unfortunately, my daughter Flora was unable to join us due to feeling unwell that day.

June was a very good month for hotels. We visited six different ones, four for meals, including our old favourites, Dunkeld, Ballathie and Gleneagles, and two more for coffee.

The grounds at Gleneagles are beautiful year-round, but perhaps particularly attractive in the summer when its many trees are in full leaf.

It wasn’t a particularly warm day when we lunched at The Dormy restaurant in Gleneagles. For some reason (perhaps because she’s done it so many times before in the same place) Lorna didn’t take any photographs of our meal, but she did take a few when we’d moved over to the fireside for hot drinks. It was nice to have the fire on in June.

Underneath the glass top of the coffee table there were several board games. We took out the draughts board and I tried hard to remember how to play the game. Some of the pieces were missing, but there were other small objects in the box that did the turn.

At the end of June we had lunch at Dalmunzie Castle Hotel, a place we only discovered last year. The hotel sits in a secluded glen near Spittal of Glenshee, roughly halfway between Blairgowrie and Braemar. It’s reached by a long private drive.

Similar to Ballathie House Hotel, Dalmunzie serves lunches throughout the week in the lounge areas rather than the dining room.

The main reception room contains a number of sofas and armchairs.

Just round the corner from this main room there’s a quiet little area containing one sofa and two armchairs, and that was where we chose to sit for lunch.

The sandwiches were generously filled, made with thick soft bread, and accompanied by a bowl of salted crisps.

After lunch, we took a short walk up past the hotel to admire the glen beyond. It looked quite forbidding, but majestic.

If you’ve enjoyed these hotels, watch out for Part Two, coming soon….