An estate with glorious views and a library tower on the shores of Loch Ness
This spectacularly-located estate on the banks of Loch Ness offers grand accommodation, miles of land and a castellated tower with a 360-degree viewing and entertaining space. Toby Keel reports.

The dream of living in a spectacular castle on a Scottish estate has a huge draw for many of us — not for nothing is our round-up of spectacular scottish castles and estates for sale one of the most-clicked pages on the Country Life website.
The appeal isn't hard to understand: grand properties which look like they've escaped from the pages of a Walter Scott novel, looking across craggy mountains and the liquorice-dark waters of romantic lochs, with endless space to roam. Magnificent.
The Bunloit Estate is a prime example of all the above, currently for sale via Strutt & Parker for offers over £2.4m – that price is for the entire 1,264 acres, but you'll save £650,000 or so if you don't want the 300-acres of that which are commercial woodland.
The property consists of a principal house overlooking the splendour of Loch Ness, two traditional self-contained holiday cottages, farm land, sporting rights and some highly attractive native woodland and moorland.
The main house is a three bedroom former schoolhouse built in 1876 and which remained a working school (with an excellent reputation) until 1956. There are unusual touches: one or two of the school features remain — bells and pegs and so on — while the layout has the main sitting room upstairs and the enormous master bedroom downstairs. It makes total sense: this way the house's largest and grandest room enjoys the best of the views.
There's also a large kitchen-diner, a home office, boot room and long dining room, among other features.
The relatively modest size of both house and estate make this a very manageable prospect, and the holiday cottages could form the basis of a fine little business — especially given the transport links at Inverness, an easy drive along the north side of the loch.
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What could make that business even more successful is the castellated Tower House, built in 2006 by the present owners. Rather wonderfully they created it principally to act as a library to house their extensive collection of books, as well as offering a study and providing a 360-degree view entertaining space at the top.
While it'd be wonderful to keep as a facility for the new owners of the main house, it'd also make a spectacular holiday let (subject to permissions and so on) that would surely command a big premium on Air BnB.
Credit: Strutt and Parker
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Toby Keel is Country Life's Digital Director, and has been running the website and social media channels since 2016. A former sports journalist, he writes about property, cars, lifestyle, travel, nature.
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