Star Hotel in Moffat Scotland Has Made it to the Guinness Book
Moffat in southern Scotland is the gateway to Scotland as it is the first halt when you arrive from England. This charming town with beautiful old buildings was Scotland’s first spa resort in the eighteenth century and today is well known for the wide array of food, drink and fine hotels it offers.
Thanks to the popularity of spas and sulphur waters till the Victorian days, Moffat has a large number of hotels to suit all tastes and budgets. Today Moffat’s claim to fame is that one of its hotels, the Star Hotel, has entered the Guinness Book of Records as the narrowest hotel in the world. While Holland’s Grand Hotel de Kromme Raake is the smallest in the world and Hotel Molinos in Granada, Spain is narrower, it is not detached on all sides like the Star Hotel.
The certificate hangs in the narrow corridor of this hotel which is only twenty feet wide! The building is however five stories high and is one of the tallest buildings in the town’s High Street. It is also 165 feet deep from the front of the building to the rear. Built in the late 1700s when Moffat was a booming spa town, Star Hotel was probably built this narrow as there was a tax on building frontage at the time.
When you stand outside on the front steps of Star Hotel and look right and you can see across to Syme Street, the narrowest street in Scotland. Chapel Street, the shortest street in the country is just around the corner, hundred feet down Star Street. Despite these extreme dimensions, Moffat is actually very attractive and popular tourist town, a status it has held since the 17th century.
The area in the centre of the High Street, variously used over the centuries as a bowling green, market place and open space is today a car park with an impressive war memorial erected in 1920 nearby. There are lovely walks one can take in the rolling hills that surround the town and ancient woodland nearby. Tourism, forestry and agriculture are the main industries of Moffat today.
