Go Touch Grass: The East Lothian Hotel Made For A Friends’ Getaway

By Emma Kate Miller

The Leddie sits in the heart of Aberlady, bringing boutique-hotel polish to one of East Lothian’s prettiest coastal villages.

When did seeing your friends become something squeezed between everything else? One night at The Leddie in Aberlady reminded us that sometimes friendship needs more than a WhatsApp thread and a hastily arranged coffee.

There comes a point in adult friendship when you realise you know quite a lot about your friends’ lives without having properly seen them.

You know what happened at work because it was on WhatsApp. You’ve seen the photograph of the new haircut, heard the voice note about the family drama and sent the appropriate number of exclamation marks when something good happened. Technically, you’re completely up to date. Yet when was the last time you sat together with absolutely nowhere else to be?

Which is how Nicola, our good friend Julie and I found ourselves at The Leddie in Aberlady, ostensibly for a night away, but really for something we hadn’t realised we needed quite so much: time.

Inside The Leddie In Aberlady

The welcoming reception and lounge at The Leddie, where relaxed interiors set the tone for an easy East Lothian escape.

The Leddie is a 27-bedroom, four-star boutique hotel in the middle of this small East Lothian coastal village, occupying a building whose history stretches back to 1638. Following an extensive restoration, it reopened as The Leddie in 2024, retaining the character of the original building while giving it a considerably more polished new life.

And it is very nicely done. The palette is soft and soothing, with tactile fabrics, natural materials and the sort of lighting that makes you wonder why your own house can’t look this flattering. Nothing shouts for attention, yet everything feels considered. The shower rooms are particularly beautiful, to the extent that somewhere between checking in and getting ready for dinner I had mentally embarked upon a home refurbishment.

There are corners you actually want to sit in, which sounds like a fairly basic requirement of a hotel until you consider how many get it wrong. The overall effect is calming rather than showy, somewhere that encourages you to settle rather than start wondering what you should be doing next.

The Cottage Suites Are Made For A Friends’ Stay

The Leddie’s Cottage Suites combine calming interiors, generous space and some seriously lovely bathrooms — ideal for a night away with friends.

Our set-up made it particularly good for a night away with friends. The Leddie’s two Cottage Suites can be booked separately or connected, as ours were, which gave us plenty of space while still allowing us to wander between the two. One bedroom was made up as a double and the other with twin beds. It felt less like disappearing to separate hotel rooms at the end of the evening and more like having a very lovely little East Lothian home for the night.

There was homemade shortbread waiting for us too. A tiny thing, admittedly, but hotels are often remembered for tiny things.

Why Aberlady Is Ideal For Switching Off

From the Cottage Suites at The Leddie to nearby Aberlady Bay, this is the kind of East Lothian escape made for slowing down.

There is not, it must be said, a vast amount to do in Aberlady. And that might be exactly why this works.

This is serious golfing country, while Aberlady Bay Nature Reserve provides the considerably less competitive option of a good walk. But you can also do neither. When everyday life is already full of things that need to be achieved, booked, answered and crossed off, going somewhere that makes no particular demands on you starts to feel rather luxurious.

Sometimes the point of going away is simply to be somewhere nicer than your own kitchen.

We caught the last of the summer sunshine and took drinks outside on the patio. Nothing groundbreaking happened. Nobody suggested an activity. There was no schedule to keep to and no one glancing at the clock because they had to get home. We just sat, talked and let one conversation wander into another.

The Friendship Equivalent Of Touching Grass

This, it turns out, is the friendship equivalent of touching grass.

The internet phrase usually means disconnecting from the digital world and returning to real life. Applied to friendship, it feels particularly apt. Group chats are brilliant at maintaining relationships, but they’re not quite the same as inhabiting them. You need the tangents, the stories you would never bother typing out, the “while I remember…” moments and the conversations that only happen after you’ve already been talking for three hours.

Dinner And Service At The Leddie

Dinner at The Leddie is relaxed and unfussy, with a focus on local ingredients and plenty of inviting corners to settle into.

Dinner required nothing more strenuous than moving inside. The food at The Leddie is good quality and unfussy, with a focus on local ingredients, and fitted the mood of the hotel perfectly. No unnecessary theatre, just a very enjoyable dinner in lovely surroundings.

But one of the things we noticed most was the service. The staff were relaxed and personable while remaining efficient and, unusually, appeared to be genuinely enjoying being at work. That changes the atmosphere of a hotel more than any amount of clever interior design. When the people looking after you seem at ease, guests tend to be too.

It turns out there is some substance behind that impression. General Manager Robert Clark was selected for HIT Scotland’s Art of Leadership Scholarship in 2026, while The Leddie’s bar and restaurant manager Frazer Short was named one of the UK hospitality industry’s top 30 talents under 30 at this year’s Acorn Awards. The hotel itself has also picked up recognition since opening, including East Lothian Hotel of the Year.

Bathrobes, Sheet Masks And Midnight Gossip

After dinner, it was back to the cottages and those shower rooms, which are every bit as lovely to use as they are to look at. Showers done, bathrobes and slippers on, out came the Korean sheet masks and foot packs, followed by the sort of gossip that starts with something entirely innocuous and somehow keeps everyone awake until midnight.

There is something pleasingly adolescent about staying up too late talking to your friends, albeit now with considerably better skincare, bathrobes and bathrooms. No one had to drive home, tidy the kitchen or declare that they really ought to get going. We could simply keep talking until eventually sleep won.

The next morning came a hearty Scottish breakfast, pots of tea and, inevitably, the continuation of at least one conversation from the night before.

Why 15 Hours Away Can Be Enough

From check-in to heading home, we had been away for around 15 hours.

Fifteen hours. Barely enough time to qualify as a break, you might think. Yet it was enough for drinks in the last of the summer sunshine, dinner, Korean skincare, several hours of uninterrupted gossip, a good night’s sleep and breakfast somebody else had cooked.

We spend a lot of time trying to engineer grand escapes from busy lives when occasionally the answer is much smaller. Go somewhere lovely, sit with people you like and give yourselves nowhere else to be.

Those 15 hours were just the tonic we all needed.

And I’m still thinking about those shower rooms.