Just returned from our two week Scottish honeymoon.
A few people requested details, so I'm just going to copy a report I sent to some friends.

In short:
Best hotel: Taychreggan

Worst hotel: Hillview B&B on Skye, which our chosen B&B so thoughtfully put us in when there was a booking mixup. Awful, modern horrendously decorated house. Ugly, unfriendly owner, other people staying with mucous in their throats, and breakfast made me sick.

Best sleeper hotel (great though not in guidebooks): Braelangwell House

Most disappointing hotel: Well, we didn't get to stay at the Lime Stone Cottage, but I was disappointed by the Drover's Inn

Best restaurant: Taychreggan with a fantastic 7 course meal. Bonus points for watching the sun set over the loch as we ate. Points detracted for the nasty case of indigestion following the meal. Second place was Stac Polly in Edinburgh.

Most overhyped restaurant: The Tapas Tree in Edinburgh. Well recommended in the guidebooks, really boring crap food. Note to self: No more restaurants with puns as names.

Best travel experience: Probably just driving around looking at the scenery listening to music. Whisky distilleries also fun.

Worst travel experience: Trying to get out of JFK during a blackout. A nightmare.

Most overhyped travel experience: The Isle of Skye. Very pretty, and we enjoyed ourselves, but just not the magical place that people seem to rave about. Don't really get it.

Best scenery: Husband: The Cairngorms. Big bare hills covered in purple heather. Me: Tie between the Cairngorms and GlenFinnan/ Glen Coe.

We flew out of New York during the blackout. It was just awful. Fortunately, we made it out.
When we arrived at London, we collected our bags, which miraculously arrived with us (though one zipper unzipped, so we were short a travel alarm clock and an umbrella). We took the Heathrow Express (a bit pricey, but worth it as it gets you to Central London in 15 minutes) to Paddington, and a taxi to our hotel, the Cranley.

The Cranley was heaven after the chaos we had been through. Our room wasn't quite ready when we arrived, but they offered us tea, which we accepted gratefully. We sat in their beautiful blue lobby and drank a lovely pot of tea with shortbread, and people were nice to us. I fell in love with the Cranley on the spot. We got to the room, which was lovely, with a half tester bed and hunting prints on the walls. We showered and felt restored.
We headed out to wander around London, which was a bit disappointing. I loved living in London when I met my husband, but every place seemed to be crawling with tourists, and you can't really do the things you do when you live there when you're just visiting for 2 days. Plus all the parks were dry and brown from the hot weather they had been having. Still, I love the city. We had lunch in a pub and wandered around, then headed down to Picadilly and had tea at Fortnum and Mason. The tea room, known as the Fountain, smelled unfortunately of stale cigarettes, which works better for bars than tea rooms. Went back to the hotel to rest and change, took a nap, I took a bath. We had complimentary champagne and canapes in the lobby.
Walked down through Chelsea and Fulham, and walked and walked. You forget how big London is. Eventually found a restaurant to have dinner -- Dan's, which I had been to years ago. We got pretty shoddy service though, being seated in a separate room from everyone else and treated as if we didn't belong. Whatever. The food was fine. We took a cab back to the hotel and fell asleep.

The next day was Sunday, which meant nothing was open until noon, so we lounged around and had breakfast in bed (included in our room rate) and read the paper. Around 10:30, we got ready to go out, though I was feeling crappy (remnants of a bad cold). Saw an outdoor exhibit at the Natural History museum of this guy who takes neat aerial photographs. I had actually seen the exhibit before in Paris, but it was still cool. Yann Arthus Bertrand. Unfortunately, the exhibit was accompanied by preachy environmental stuff. We went to the British Library, which is in an ugly building, but has cool stuff like the Magna Carta and the original lyrics to Yesterday, and wandered through Bloomsbury to the Strand, where nothing was open, and Covent Garden, where we poked around in shops and bought bath bombs at Lush. Mmmm. Lush. Continued to walk along the river.
afternoon tea at our hotel -- scones this time, also included in the room rate -- did I mention I LOVE the Cranley? Rested a bit, then headed out to dinner to Soho. Had a very good and very reasonable dinner at Andrew Edmunds in Soho. Love that you can get half bottles of wine with dinner in Britain, as we don't always want a full, especially if we have drinks before dinner, which we often do. Soho is very seedy and full of sex shops, and all the phone booths smell of urine

Thanks for the info kcw. We are planning Scotland for April, so your info will come in handy.

Anyway, the next morning we got up and went to the Tower of London, which we hadn't done as students because it costs something like $17 per person. It was fun, though my husband spent FAR TOO LONG looking at guns and swords, so wives be warned. Headed back to Heathrow, then caught our flight to Edinburgh. Arrived and got a taxi to our hotel, the Windmill House. It was a B&B, with no locks on the rooms, but a really beautiful house they had built in a Georgian style, and our room was huge, and it was in this sort of woodsy area a mile outside of downtown.
Anyway, the Windmill House was beautiful, and we walked the very pretty but quite long walk into town. The Edinburgh Festival, a big arts show, was going on, but the city was less crowded than I expected it to be. Edinburgh has 2 sections -- the New Town and the Old Town. The old town is centered on the castle, which just towers on this rock, and really dominates the town, and is medieval, with cobbled streets and narrow closes (alleys, but British, so quainter). The New Town is Georgian Town planning, with wide streets and beautiful buildings. We wandered around the new town, stopped in a few pubs for beer and whisky, and eventually had dinner, which was crappy. Took a cab back to our hotel, which proved difficult for the cabby to find.

The next day we took a bus into town, which was easy, and went to the Museum of Scotland, which had all these Archaeological Artifacts, and traced the history of Scotland from pre-human to the 20th Century. Very interesting. Then we had lunch at the Witchery. It was a very beautiful restaurant, but not as ornate as I had expected. They had a lunch menu which was a bargain, with 2 courses for L10, and we had a lovely light lunch, with very good wines by the glass. After lunch we went to Mary King's Close, which is a close/alley, that had been closed off in the 18th century, and had a building built on top of it (the closes are very steep because the old town is so much higher than the New Town, and there used to be a lake between them, which has been drained and is now a park and the train station.) They just opened it to the public in April, and they give tours that give you ideas of what it was like to live in Edinburgh in the 16th and 17th centuries. Very cool and informative, and just a little hokey with ghost stories etc. Kenyon decided he wanted to see a fringe show, so we bought tickets, and split up so he could climb a mountain, and I could go to the Scottish Portrait Gallery. We met for the fringe show which was very fringey -- a comedy show with decent jokes and horrid delivery, then had dinner at Stac Polly, which was really really really good. Mmmmm. Had problems with a cab back to the hotel, again, but made it eventually. The hotel was beautiful, but a little tucked out of the way, and difficult for cabbies to find. I might prefer to stay there if I had a car, but parking is difficult in downtown Edinburgh.

forgot to tell about breakfast at Windmill House -- Breakfast in a Scottish hotel consists of a buffet with fruit and cereal and yogurt and juice, followed by a cooked breakfast, composed of combinations of bacon (good British bacon, which is less fatty than American), sausage, eggs, baked beans, mushrooms, black pudding (a pudding made with grain and blood -- actually quite good), haggis, grilled tomato, smoked haddock, grilled kippered herrings, potato scones, and toast, always served in a rack so it gets cold quickly. The buffet part of Windmill House was the best we saw, with huge bowls full of berries and platters of melon. We sat at a big table and chatted with the other guests, a setup we saw at about half the hotels and ended up being very interesting to see other people and how they were travelling and where they were from.

After breakfast the second day, we checked out (windmill house only took cash, which was surprising as it was quite expensive), and got to the airport to get our car, a ford fusion we christened Mungo.

So we picked up our car and headed into the Kingdom of Fife. (Basically, a county, but with a funny name, like Virginia is a commonwealth instead of a state). We swung by the fishing villages of the East Neuk, which are supposed to be stunningly picturesque, but I was frankly a little disappointed. Stopped for tea twice (once because we had stopped before and needed to pee -- I talked Kenyon into a very good pear ginger cake) Had excellent fish and chips in Anstruther, though.
Then we went up to St. Andrews, the home of golf. Really a
pilgrimage for DH, mostly because of his dad.
Had ice cream and drove to Dunkeld and Birnam, where we stayed in a nice B&B called the Birnam Wood Housewith a lovely chatty couple. It was like staying in their house, but they were so friendly. We asked for dinner recommendations, and they sent us to a pub where their son worked that played a lot of folk music, the Taybank, where we ate stovies (potato stew) and drank beer and whisky. A very amenable place.

After breakfast the next day, we drove up through the Cairngorms, which are these big bleak hills/mountains. Beautiful scenery. And it wasn't too long before they were all covered in heather, which was beautiful, and smelled heavenly. DH kept getting out of the car to sprint up mountains and take pictures. I don't do mountains, so he was on his own. He totally hogged the camera, though.

We stopped and had a picnic of apples and cheese, then headed to our first distillery, the Glenlivet.
Now, before this we had been scotch drinkers, and we had been drinking it in pubs, but this was really the first time we had learned about whisky. It's a whole world unto itself.
So the distillery tours are very informative, and you get to taste the whisky afterwards, and they smell really good -- like yeast and beer and malt. Mmm. After Glenlivet we went to Cardhu, a much smaller distillery, but less interesting, and DH was put off because they made the guide wear a kilt.

We got to our hotel around 6, and immediately went to the bar. The Craigellachie Hotel room was only OK, but the bar was amazing. They have over 480 different bottlings of whisky and a bartender who is like the most well-versed sommelier in a top restaurant in New York. I told him what types I had tried, and he recommended a whisky to try based on what I had liked, but that tasted totally different. One of the ones I tried was a special bottling of Glenlivet for the hotel, which was 23 years old (matured in the barrels for 23 years, it doesn't change after you bottle it, unlike wine), taken from a single sherry cask (Glenlivet makes its malt by mixing sherry and bourbon casks), and cask strength (about 59% alcohol, instead of the usual 43%. It sold for L125 a bottle, and was wonderful, with tastes of caramel and oranges. We had dinner at the hotel, which was good, but not as interesting as the whisky.

The next day, after breakfast (we tried haggis and it was awful -- I was prepared to have an open mind but I just don't like things made with kidneys -- tastes like urine). We went driving. We stopped at Cawdor castle, the family home of the Earls of Cawdor, who open it to visitors in the summer.

After Cawdor, we drove to Culloden Moor, the sight of the last battle of the 1745 Rising, in which the Highland army of Bonnie Prince Charlie was slaughtered. It's very sad, with clan gravestones everywhere. They have sheep there to keep down the trees so it stays a moor.
Drove up to Inverness and around the Beauly forth to the Black Isle, a peninsula north of Inverness where the aforementioned Braelangwell House was. I loved this B&B. It was at the end of a long rutted drive, but it's this beautiful 1790 house that these people from England bought and renovated. The house is beautifully decorated, and it's big enough that you feel total privacy, though there are public sitting rooms for the guests to use. The owner was very friendly, though a little manic, as his wife was two days overdue for having a baby (He was probably in his 40's, and they had been married for 13 years, so this was very exciting indeed.) He brought sherry to our room and left us alone to explore.

Breakfast was really excellent here, with homemade muesli, and girdle scones (like flat scones). Even the second day, which was the day the owner had her baby! So they had a substitute come in and cook breakfast. Breakfast was at a beautiful communal dining table, but lovely.

Anyway, that day, we wandered around the grounds (70 acres), visiting the croquet lawn, the burn (brook) and resident cows. We had dinner in nearby Fortrose, at the Royal Hotel which is owned by a guy from Philadelphia. It was very good.

The next day we drove down to Loch Ness and visited Urquhart castle, then DH dropped me off in Inverness to shop while he played golf. Don't do this. Inverness was not so fun. It was recently very poor, and all the shops are chains or discounts, and there's nothing much to see. I ended up spending a lot of time at the mall, which is where the locals were hanging out. We had a late dinner in Inverness, at supposedly the best restaurant there, La Riviera, which was eh. Well, it was pretty good, but not as good as expectations.

Next morning we played with the 4 dogs a bit, then drove north. Hit Tain and Dornoch, then headed west. Drove to the most godforsaken place -- Achiltibuie -- at one end of a very long single track road -- but had a very good, very late lunch (I had had some bloodsugar problems) at the hotel bar there of smoked salmon sandwiches with lemon curd. An odd combination, but it worked. We drove out of Achiltibuie, and on to Ullapool, which has one of the prettiest settings of any town I'd seen. Our B&B, Braemore Square, was just past Ullapool, and it was a bit more standard, but the hosts were very friendly -- they had recently visited New York and loved it.

The next day we drove for scenery --
1 track road over a mountain, where we stopped at a parking place and had a picnic on the heather on top of a hill with a view of Skye. It was lovely. Drove through more scenic scenery -- the west highlands are just stunning -- and drove to Skye. The B&B I had booked told me that there was a mix up with the booking, and they sent us down the road. It was not what we were looking for on our honeymoon -- very lacking in character and modern.
So we got out of there as fast as possible, then had a few drinks and dinner in the bar of the Eilean Iarmain, and drove to the west of the island to catch the sunset, which we just missed.
We called around and found accommodation for our second night on Skye at Viewfield House -- an old Victorian house that has been in the same family for generations. It's incredibly Victorian (due to additions in the 19th century), and the owner's grandparents had lived in India, so it was decorated with exotic animal heads, and Indian artifacts. Very Raj.
Met in the drawing room for drinks before dinner, which felt very Agatha Christie. Got into a political discussion with our fellow houseguests. It was very fun. We had separate tables for dinner (at Viewfield House you have to eat in your first night, but the food was very good), and then met in the drawing room again after dinner for coffee and petit fours. It was very convivial, and full of character -- a lovely change from the awful place we had stayed the previous night.

The next morning we took the ferry to Mallaig, which was very late, so we got a very late start to the day. Drove through Glenfinnan, where we saw the viaduct, of Harry Potter Train fame. There's a steam train that runs on the viaduct from Fort William to Mallaig in the summer, and we thought it would be very fun to ride, but not this trip. Had a late lunch in Fort William, which was better than Inverness but only just, and drove through Glen Coe, which was awesomely beautiful, I thought.

Our hotel that evening was the Drover's Inn, the lobby of which made Viewfield House look like an animal sanctuary. There was no receptionist -- we got our keys from the bartender, and we were (unfortunately) staying at the new hotel across the street. It was suitably atmospheric though, with a canopy bed, tartan everywhere, and an antelope skull on the wall. Plus there were spiderwebs everywhere.
Had dinner in the newer restaurant, which was disturbingly empty -- ate a somewhat disturbing venison in Chocolate sauce. Very chocolatey, but not bad, just ... odd.

The next day we drove to Stirling, where I twisted my ankle, though not badly, and we saw the castle, which was not as good as Edinburgh castle, and the Wallace Monument (of Braveheart fame). Got horribly lost on the motorways around Stirling, but eventually found a pleasant little road to take us west, and drove up the shores of Loch Lomond back to the hotel, where we had a couple of whiskys in the VERY atmospheric pub (which was definitely the best part of the hotel) and made our way to bed.

The next morning we drove through Oban, which was a very pretty town and merits a longer stop on the next trip, then down to the Kilmartin Glen, which has all these prehistoric monuments, like standing stones, and stone circles, and carved stones and cairns.
We also discovered Scotland's largest peat bog entirely by accident.

Had a picnic at the Peat Bog, with fantastic stuff we bought at a deli in Oban called the Kitchen Garden, like Stilton and smoked duck breast and parsnip chips. Mmm.

We drove on to Taychreggan, our final Scottish hotel, which is just beautifully situated. Had a fantastic dinner in their restaurant.

The next day we drove to Edinburgh, returned the car and flew to London, where we checked into the Hilton Paddington. Had a lovely lunch at St. Quentin the next day before catching our flight at Heathrow.

I am at work as I read your messages. My husband and I visited many of the same places you did on our trip this past June. It was great to think about our trip again. Thanks for your thoughts.

What a really great trip report. Thank you!