Crieff Hydro Hotel, Perthshire

The nineteenth-century passion for healthy holidays and bracing therapeutic regimes based on cold showers, physical exercise and clear mountain air has left Scotland with some of its finest hotels. Most have long since given up their hydropathic origins and become largely indistinguishable from other modern leisure establishments. But there is one that still preserves something of the flavour of a sanatorium, albeit a very warm and welcoming one, and which offers a unique glimpse into the regimented world of clean-living, muscular Christianity in which so many Victorians found recreation and refreshment.