Open every night except the month of January
Morvik Head, on the Skarre coast · 58° 41′ N
Open every night except the month of January
Morvik Head, on the Skarre coast · 58° 41′ N
Hotel and restaurant · Est. 1911 as a herring station
Twenty-four rooms, a sauna on the slipway, and a restaurant people drive three hours for. Open every night of the year except the ones in January.
Sunset tonight
16:38
High water
06:48 · 19:12
Sea at the slipway
9.5 °C
Tonight at Skarre
Seven courses, 19:30
The house
1911
Built to salt herring for the Baltic trade. Closed in 1964, roofless by 1990, reopened as Halden in 2019.
We are at the end of a single-track road, eleven kilometres past the last village shop. That is most of the point. There is a fire in the long room from four o’clock, a sauna on the slipway until ten, and one dinner a night, cooked for everyone at once from whatever the boats and the crofts brought up that morning.
Tobias Wren and Maren Aske
Keepers of the house, and its kitchen
Stay
Five kinds of room across the old station, the net loft and the boathouse. Breakfast is in every rate, and every rate is published.
Skarre, the restaurant
Maren and a kitchen of five cook a single tasting menu of seven courses for thirty-two covers. It is built from what the two creel boats and four crofts within eleven kilometres bring up the hill before ten. Residents are seated first; the rest of the room opens to the village and to anyone willing to drive the Morvik road in the dark.
£115
Seven courses
19:30
One sitting
32
Covers a night
A day, roughly
But most days here fall into the same shape, set by the light and the tide rather than by us. This is a Tuesday in October.
07:20
A swim off the slipway
Robes hang by the boathouse door. The sauna is already warm; Ivor lights it at six.
09:00
Breakfast in the long room
Porridge with cream and heather honey, eggs from the croft, kippers smoked in the yard.
11:30
Out with the boat to Inner Ness
Forty minutes across, two hours on the island with the seals, a flask and a piece of cake.
16:00
The fire is lit
Tea and toasted bannocks in front of it. The library holds four hundred books and no screens.
19:30
Dinner at Skarre
Seven courses, about three hours. Then the sky, which on a clear night has no light in it at all.
What was written
“The best argument I know for driving somewhere that the road stops. The rooms are quiet in a way that feels expensive; the dinner is quiet in a way that feels confident.”
The Northern Review · Hotels of the year
“Maren Aske cooks as if the menu was argued over with the tide. It probably was.”
Slow Travel Quarterly
“Twenty-four rooms, and somehow no bad one among them. Ask for the Boathouse and then ask again.”
The Weekend Coast
“A sauna on a slipway, a swim in November, a fire, a dinner. I have not slept like that in years.”
Field and Harbour
Letters from the coast
New dates open to readers a week before anyone else, which in practice is how the Boathouse gets booked.
