Inverlair Lodge for sale

 

Inverlair Lodge via The Unmutual Web Site

Inverlair Lodge is one our more interesting subjects, having taken part in the secret training operations carried out in the isolation of Scotland during World War II. This past history was to become the inspiration for the 1960 television series, The Prisoner.

If you have a spare £1 million (at least) or so, then Inverlair Lodge, and its surrounding estate could be yours. Details of the lodge and the sale can be found in the related pdf document, which has some excellent pictures and details of the site.

Sadly, the brochure also contains the following carefully worded myth, no doubt added with an eye on raising the profile of the lodge and possibly boosting its desirability and price:

It is reputed that Rudolph Hess, Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party was imprisoned in Inverlair following his crash landing near Glasgow in May 1941 on his secret mission to Britain.

Take it from your scribe, the chance of Rudolf Hess ever having been anywhere near the house are as remote as a summer without rain in Scotland. You’ll find a short itinerary of his visit to Scotland, together with the dates and places he is known to have been moved to and been held at, on our Rudolf Hess Flight page. Quite why anyone would have moved him there and back given the remoteness of the location and travel time involved is one mystery, while the other would be where they would have found the time anyway, between his arrival and fairly rapid despatch to London.

In 1941, the lodge was requisitioned and became one of the facilities operated by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II, and was known as No.6 Special Workshop School, part Inter Services Research Bureau (ISRB),

SOE (and SIS or MI6) planned many secret operations in enemy territory during World War II, and it was inevitable that there would be occasions where volunteers would refuse to take part once they became aware of the full details. Some were unable to kill when the occasion was reduced to a one-on-one scenario, as opposed the anonymity of a battlefield exchange. With information being released on a Need to Know basis, their training meant that they were in possession of highly classified and secret information relating to pending missions, and could not be allowed to return to public life, where a careless remark could have compromised their secrecy. Inverlair Lodge became a detention or internment camp where such individuals could be accommodated, safely isolated from public contact. Conditions there were described as luxurious, and the lodge was even said to provide a safe haven for former agents or spies, who could not risk being seen in public, for fear of being recognised and killed in retaliation for missions they had carried out.

George Markstein, who worked with Patrick McGoohan on the 1960s TV series The Prisoner, has told of how he learnt about places such as Inverlair Lodge during the war, when he was a journalist, and there can be little doubt that the discovery influenced the design of the fictional Village in which the series was set. Commenting on the residents “They were largely people who had been compromised. They had reached the point in their career where they knew too much to be let loose, but they hadn’t actually done anything wrong. They weren’t in any way traitors, they hadn’t betrayed anything, but in their own interest it was better if they were kept safely.“