Cameron House UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT:
Britain’s most decorated female Olympian, Dame Katherine Grainger DBE showed off her adventure loving and competitive nature when she spent a day with Dream Escape in her new role as Sports Ambassador for the luxury Cameron House Hotel WORDS | ANNABEL MACKIE
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n the shadow of the majestic Ben Lomond mountain in the Scottish Highlands, the hauntingly beautiful Loch Lomond, a ribbon-shaped body of water scattered with 22 islands and 27 islets, has long inspired poets and writers. None more notable, perhaps, than the Jacobite-era ballad 'The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond'. More recently, this magical place that lies around 40-minutes’ drive northwest of the cosmopolitan city of Glasgow, was the chosen spot for Dame Katherine Grainger, Britain’s most decorated female Olympian who won five medals for rowing from five consecutive games and is an eight-time World Champion, to write her autobiography Dreams Do Come True. The Glasgow-born sportswoman has strong connections to the area, with many childhood forays into 32
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Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park, as well as having celebrated several family events at Cameron House, a 164-room luxury resort that sits at the 24-mile-long loch’s southern tip. So, when she was invited by the fivestar hotel to spend some time at one of their 115 lochside lodges dotted around the 400-acre estate after winning, in her words, the “elusive” gold medal at the London Olympics in 2012, she jumped at the chance. Speaking to Dream Escape, Grainger admitted that after winning gold she’d, “struggled to find the time, space and energy to write” and so this was the perfect solution. “For me, it was the most wonderful place to escape, to reminisce, to create. I wrote, I walked by the loch, I lost myself in memories and let it all spill out onto the pages.” So, when she was asked, last year, to be the hotel’s Sport Ambassador, she told us that: “It was just one of those
