Journalism // A Hotel Story: The Fife Arms (SUITCASE Magazine Vol. 27)
I organised a trip to The Fife Arms hotel the Scottish Highlands in early 2019, the latest hospitality project from art-world power couple Iwan and Manuela Wirth. As part of the "A Hotel Story" regular feature I interviewed poet Alec Findlay, participated in a ceilidh in the village hall and drove up into the mountains with local guide Ian Murray to understand the ways in which the hotel is as much an act of local storytelling as a luxurious country retreat. Read extracts below or the full story at: https://suitcasemag.com/articles/hotel-story-fife-arms-braemar-scotland
Some libraries are grandiose temples, their leather-bound first editions and soaring shelves whispering classical tales in velvety tones. Others are more humble, the dog-eared pages and cracked spines of their contents testament to the many hands and minds they’ve touched. All, however, are a refuge for stories both real and imagined – houses for all the minutiae of human experience, waiting to be decoded, debated and passed on.
And some libraries aren’t libraries at all. This is certainly the case at The Fife Arms, the much-lauded hotel project from art-world power couple Iwan and Manuela Wirth. Their gallerist’s touch is evident; although there are no exhibitions here, the rather unassuming exterior conceals a nexus of ideas, a bewildering portmanteau of eras and characters that tip you a sly wink as you journey from room to room, piecing together the fragments of wry Victoriana, Scottish legend and futuristic fiction. It is a living library, an act of imagination seeking to establish new limits for the Highlands community held dear to its instigators. As the poet Alec Finlay, one of several collaborators brought on board for the hotel’s launch, tells me, it is “mapping the past, in the present, as a way into the future”.
I drive up into the indigo hills with local writer and guide Ian Murray in search of the landscape Finlay describes. We pass shaggy, ginger-snap Highland cows as we ascend into the sleety skies and snow-capped mountains, spotting grouse and the odd deer among the russet-coloured heather. As we break through to the other side of the mountain, a brilliant-blue sky cracks open the gloom and we stop on the banks of a navy loch, a postcard-perfect rainbow stretching from one side to the other. The cold clarity of it is almost painful and I think of Shepherd’s description of walking through the hills: “one walks the flesh transparent... flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.”
Before I leave, I bump into Finlay in The Flying Stag, the bustling village pub attached to The Fife Arms. I tell him I’ve been out in the Cairngorms and he replies, “I can tell – you’ve got light in your eyes.” And this is how I feel as I depart this curious, ambitious gem of a hotel – with eyes full of light, lungs full of air and a head full of stories.
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