The Old Post Office, Lagg — New Self Catering on Jura

Some houses change hands. This one came home.

The Old Post Office sits above Lagg Bay, a mid-1700s stone building that later served as the local post office and has just reopened as a self-catering holiday let, run by a family with a genuinely unusual connection to the place.

A Clark family returns

Elizabeth Clark McCormack — Betsy to most people — bought the house in 2026, but her family’s link to Jura goes back much further than the sale. Her ancestor Gilbert Clark returned to the island after fighting in Ireland around the time of the Battle of the Boyne, coming home to devastating loss: his first wife and most of their family had been killed in the religious conflict of the era. He rebuilt, remarried, and it’s from that line that his descendant Alexander Clark was born.

In the early 1730s, Alexander left Jura for North Carolina with his wife Flora McLean, part of the wave of Highland settlers who helped found the Barbecue Presbyterian Church community in the Cape Fear region. Almost 300 years later, Betsy came back to walk the same ground.

A Lindsay connection, too

The visit turned into something bigger than family history. While on Jura, Betsy’s daughter Jane met Cameron Lindsay, whose family has deep island roots of its own — his father Graeme, a retired RAF serviceman, is the island’s current postman, continuing a line that traces back to John Lindsay, who held the same job in the mid-to-late 1800s, and to whom this particular house has been tied for generations.

Jane and Cameron fell in love and married. It was only after that Betsy bought the Lindsay family’s old house at Lagg. Two island families, one house, and a connection neither was expecting.

What’s actually there

Past the history, it’s a proper Jura holiday house. Three bedrooms (two en-suite), a farmhouse kitchen built around an Aga, and two log burners for the evenings after a day outside.

The white-harled walls, exposed beams, stripped timber doors and lattice windows are original, kept rather than replaced. It sits a short walk from the shore at Lagg, about 8.5 miles from Craighouse, with deer and sheep grazing nearby and birds of prey overhead.