One of the four hotels on the island of Barra has been put up for sale by the family who have owned it for more than 40 years.
The Heathbank Hotel at Northbay was originally built as a mission house/church, around the mid 19th century. About 100 years later the building was offering accommodation as a guest house. During the making of the classic film Whisky Galore, in 1948, some of the cast stayed in Heathbank.
It first opened as a hotel in 1974 allowing Northbay to enjoy its first licensed premises since the closing of the Old Inn decades before
Now the Heathbank Hotel is set to change hands after more than four decades of the MacLeod family running it, as Joe and Kathleen MacLeod have decided to retire.
Selling agents Colliers International are inviting offers around £375,000 for the hotel.
Alistair Letham, a director in the UK hotels agency team at Colliers International, said: "Heathbank Hotel is a very well established business, trading on a seasonal basis only, that provides an excellent and profitable living. This is the first time in two generations that the hotel has come on the market and represents an ideal opportunity for new family owners looking for a quintessential lifestyle business, on what has to be one of the most beautiful small islands in the UK."
Barra is the second southernmost inhabited island of the Outer Hebrides after the island of Vatersay, to which it is connected by a causeway. In 2011 the population was 1,174, almost 100 higher than the1,078 counted at the time of the 2001 census.
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