Thanks to the Fringe Festival, laughs, chuckles and guffaws will be reverberating through to the city of Edinburgh starting on Friday 2 August until the end of the month. The world’s greatest comedy festival has fairly consumed – and we use the term advisedly – the Scottish capital since 1947. If you have the opportunity to go, do not pass it up. This is the festival, after all, that launched Ms Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. Last year, it spanned 25 days and featured more than 55,000 performances of 3,548 difference shows across 317 venues. Four hundred and fifty thousand people came, saw and conquered Edinburgh. Who knows who may emerge from the crowded line-up this year?

Speaking of crowded, Edinburgh does get a bit, shall we say, overrun in the final month of the summer. Staying in the city might just feel claustrophobic. Luckily, urbanites have sought escape in Scotland for centuries, and there are several stunning sites at which you can rest your weary feet and relax your face from all that smiling. Scotland, famously, was a favourite summer retreat for Queen Victoria and her Prince Consort who, bewitched by the wild landscapes, constructed their second home in Balmoral in 1848. “All seemed to breathe freedom and peace,” wrote the Queen.

So, if you need a breath of freedom and peace following a knee-slapping performance in Edinburgh, by all means venture out of the city. Many of the houses that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert would have known are now opening their doors to paying guests. Here are seven of the very best.

There’s something almost Maldivian (well, almost) about the arrival by air on Barra, one of the remotest dots on the Hebridean archipelago. Scheduled flights from the big cities on small propeller planes land straight on the beach, leaving passengers to step out onto the cockle-shell sand. The runway disappears when the tide comes in. Perhaps the finest beach on the island, which is only seven miles across, faces west below the Isle of Barra Beach Hotel on Halaman Bay, just 15 minutes by car from the airport. Low slung and painted white, the hotel’s lounge and restaurant have acres of glass, through which to watch Atlantic storms roll in or the sun go down. Inside the decor is nautical and comfortably low key. The island, meanwhile, begs to be explored by boat (the hotel can arrange angling excursions), on foot (step down to the beach or up through wildflower grasslands and over hills to Kisimul Castle, ancient seat of the MacNeil clan) or by bike (there is one looping road).

isleofbarrahotel.co.uk

The bridge arrived in 1995, permanently tethering Skye to the Scottish mainland and presaging a tourism boom, but the Hebridean island still cleaves to its otherworldly atmosphere. The bridge may as well be a teleportation machine to a lost land of mist-shrouded peaks and moss-bound glens. Situated on a sheltered inlet on the shores of Loch na Dal, in the south of the island, Kinloch Lodge is a 16th-century hunting lodge and former home of the Macdonald clan. Mr Godfrey Macdonald and his wife Claire, a cook and food writer, opened their doors to guests in the 1970s. Their daughter Isabella now runs a hotel that revels in the well-hewn family traditions like a Scottish terrier in a tartan basket. All roaring fires, stag heads and cosy grand features, the interior is a refuge when the weather turns. So, too, is the restaurant, by most accounts the best on Skye, where Mr Marcello Tully, a Michelin-star holder for most of this decade, does remarkable things with scallops and Moray pork.

kinloch-lodge.co.uk

Scottish country hotels rarely divert from the tartan trappings visitors tend to expect, but there are exceptions for those seeking a more minimalist escape. Killiehuntly has a name to honour its position in a 4,000-acre Highland estate on the edge of the mountainous Cairngorms National Park, but its Danish owners have looked east for interiors inspiration. It is nearer Norway than London, after all. Retail billionaire Mr Anders Holch Povlsen and his wife, Ms Anne Storm Pedersen, bought the old stone farmhouse in 2011 and imbued it with a Scots-meets-Scandi chic that combines Danish contemporary furniture with the pared-down work of local craftsmen. The result is a peaceful hideaway with just four rooms stripped of such clutter and distractions as televisions and phones. And while its position is gloriously remote, Inverness is only 40 miles to the north and mainline trains, including the new Caledonian Sleeper, stop down the road at Kingussie.

killiehuntly.scot

London fund manager Mr Paul Szkiler snapped up this moth-eaten 19th-century sandstone pile in 2015 and ploughed millions into doing justice to its position, looking out towards Northern Ireland beyond the fairytale volcanic island of Ailsa Craig. Seventeen ballroom-sized rooms channel the grand Scottish-baronial style. The restaurant is back to its best with classics that owe much to Hebridean fishing traditions – day boats, smoke houses, you name it. The house is set among giant redwoods and rhododendrons and a new boat offers nautical safaris to the islands of Islay (whisky central), Jura and Gigha, where the vast seafood platter at The Boathouse restaurant ought to have its own Unesco designation. On a clearing below a bluff on remote Jura, the hotel’s chef serves a toothsome dinner at the castle’s luxe camp, which attracts interest from bemused seals and the odd nosy deer.

glenappcastle.com

The three-mile drive from bustling Fort William east to Inverlochy Castle Hotel, ideally in the hotel’s Rolls-Royce, is a journey to a different world, one of seemingly effortless personal service and time-suspended glamour. Even Queen Victoria was said to have been overcome when she made her own journey to the greystone house from Balmoral in 1873, remarking, “I never saw a lovelier or more romantic spot.” The mansion, newly built then for the third Baron Abinger, has been a hotel for almost half a century and remains as sumptuous as ever with its Venetian chandeliers and canopy beds. Its formal restaurant is where father and son Messrs Albert and Michel Roux Jr combine Gallic and Highland traditions in a destination five-course menu. Bung Le Gavroche at the foot of Ben Nevis and you get the idea.

inverlochycastlehotel.com

Sir Edwin Lutyens, the Edwardian architect behind such urban landmarks as the Cenotaph in Whitehall and the Midland Bank HQ in The City (now The Ned), is also known for his country houses. He only ventured to Scotland twice, most notably to design Greywalls, an Arts and Crafts gem overlooking the Firth of Forth. Built in 1901 for the committed sportsman and cabinet minister Mr Alfred Lyttelton, it is now a luxury hotel that is drowning in charm. Just half an hour east of Edinburgh and so close to Muirfield you could lob a potato into the 10th hole from the kitchen garden, it pulls off Edwardian chintz with such aplomb that visiting feels like stepping into the home of a stylish elderly aunt who’s very much still got it. You don’t have to love golf to stay here, but it helps. There are also beaches to romp to, single malts to sample and venison sausages to consider at Mr Albert Roux’s restaurant.

greywalls.co.uk

Foreign investors have flocked to Scotland in recent decades with dreams of turning old country houses and hotels into contemporary boltholes. The latest is Dusseldorf hospitality investment player 12.18, which has just reopened The Roxburghe Hotel & Golf Course. Formerly owned by the Duke of Roxburghe, the 20-room property close to the English border and just over an hour south of Edinburgh is now Schloss Roxburghe, Scottish sister to the owner’s much larger Schlosshotel Fleesensee in northern Germany. Its entirely renovated rooms now come with modern splashes of colour and botanical wallpapers and take a tasteful middle way between Scottish kitsch and placeless luxe. The championship golf course, built in 1997, has quickly earned a reputation as one of the country’s best and most picturesque. Shooting and fishing can also be arranged and there are major plans for a new spa, due to open next year.

schlosshotel-roxburghe.com