TO BE born a Fraser of Lovat is to inherit a legacy more glamorous than any in the Highlands. The clan’s history, stretching back to Bannockburn and beyond, is studded with triumph and disaster — deeds of great valour and bloody reprisals, but also a powerful loyalty to the family, its territory and its people. The word clan means, literally, “children”. Veronica Maclean relished and embraced that heritage. She sub-titled her memoirs, “of heroes, adventure and love”, and during a life which was never lived with less than passionate intensity, she knew all three.

As a young woman of great beauty, she was married twice, both times to heroic men. She had her own share of adventure, whether driving ambulances behind the Maginot line during the war, galloping over the Slovenian plains with a youthful Marshal Tito, or taking the wheel of a lorry bearing medical supplies to the Balkan warzone in 1992. Only a few weeks before her death she was sharing a helicopter with Paddy Ashdown, inspecting the coastline of Montenegro from the air.

She loved the people of the Highlands and her adopted country of Yugoslavia, and won their undying affection in return. Her enthusiasm was legendary, whether for food, gardening or travel.

While researching her book on royalty, she visited 27 of the 32 crowned heads of Europe. Her bestseller, Lady Maclean’s Cookbook, bringing together the recipes of her well-connected friends, has become a classic of cookery writing. She created, at the Creggans Inn in Argyllshire, a gourmet restaurant which won several awards, but whose greatest attraction were its hosts — Veronica herself and her husband, Sir Fitzroy Maclean.

During the 40 years they shared at Strachur House, she developed three gardens — formal, informal and “wild” — which stand as testimony to her creativity and her optimism, even in the most unpromising circumstances. Violet Bonham-Carter’s description of Veronica’s Tennant relations could equally apply to her: “Fun and freedom was their legacy, and their philosophy of life was founded on Christianity, patriotism and the triumph of optimism . . . the virtue they most admired was courage.”

Veronica Nell Fraser was born in London in 1920 and brought up in the Fraser family home at Beaufort Castle in Inverness-shire, a place which she later described as “quite simply paradise”. The daughter of Simon, the 16th Lord Lovat, and founder of the Lovat Scouts, she and her brothers and sisters, who included “Shimi” Lovat, a commando hero in the Second World War, and Hugh, who became a Conservative MP, enjoyed the kind of privileged but tomboyish childhood which today would be unimaginable — indeed she herself admitted that it was “a way of life which has now entirely vanished”. To be part of the Fraser clan brought with it a sense of “entitlement” — the self-confident belief that life should be conducted according to one’s own rules rather than anyone else’s. But it also meant that everyone within the clan was equally privileged. And so her friends were as likely to be ghillies and stalkers as the aristocratic families with which she was so closely linked — she once calculated that she had 50 first cousins. It also meant being a Catholic, a faith to which she remained devoted to the end of her life.

Visitors to Beaufort included many writers — Ronald Knox, Hilaire Belloc, Compton Mackenzie and Maurice Baring, her godfather, among them. Since her own education had been rudimentary — taught mainly at home, she spent barely three years at a convent on the South Coast — she learnt as much as she could from them. Knox advised her not to read too much P. G. Wodehouse: “He writes perfect English, but you don’t want to make a diet of it,” he said.

At the age of 18, she was launched on the London scene. As a debutante, her beauty dazzled her many suitors — one described her as “quite literally electrifying” — and she had to fend off several offers of marriage. It was important, she said, to “try to avoid embarrassing proposals”. When war broke out, she volunteered as a VAD nurse, and found herself driving ambulances close to the Maginot line, wearing a uniform specially designed by Lanvin. She did have one other advantage — a chance meeting at Inverness station with Winston Churchill before her departure resulted in him giving her a signed note requesting that she be given “every assistance” on her mission.

In 1940, as France surrendered, she returned to London, where she fell in love with and married Alan Phipps, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, whose ship Ivanhoe had been involved in the evacuation from Dunkirk. Their wartime marriage was one of snatched moments between dangerous assignments, and it was tragically short. In 1943, Phipps was killed by German small-arms fire during the Allied attempt to garrison the Aegean islands of Kos and Leros off Turkey. It was not until 1944, however, that his death was finally confirmed and he was awarded a posthumous mention in dispatches. Many years later she returned, with Sir Fitzroy, to the cave where he had died, and traced the walls with her fingers, “in case he had left a message for me before he died”.

After the war, Veronica’s cousin, David Stirling, founder of the SAS, introduced her to Maclean, a fellow officer, who had been parachuted into Yugoslavia to make contact with Tito’s partisans and was embarking on a political career. They married in 1946, and moved to the North of England after his election as Conservative MP for Lancaster. Later, he was created a baronet and became MP for Bute and North Ayrshire, and they bought a fine, 18th-century mansion house at Strachur, overlooking Loch Fyne.

Their life together can only be described as one of creative dissent. Fitzroy liked to think carefully about what he was saying. She preferred to jump in whenever the smallest pause presented itself, although, as she freely confessed, she was, at the time, “ignorant, opinionated, naive and disorganised, unpunctual and noisy”.

In later life, when her husband became a little deaf, the decibel level rose. “Our minds worked at different tempos, or perhaps in different gears,” she said. The most common exclamation to be heard was from Fitzroy: “If only you wouldn’t interrupt!” But it was an argument based on love. “You see,” he would say, “I love you so much I can’t bear you even to think differently from me.” On the other hand, after a particularly robust altercation, a friend asked nervously whether he had contemplated divorce. “Divorce, never. Murder — often,” he replied.

Their common interest in travel — to America, Italy, Russia, the Caucusus, and an undercover trip to Turkey for MI6 to survey possible bases on the coast — meant that their life together was never dull. In the late 1960s, they bought an old palazzo on the Croatian island of Korcula, where they and their family spent many holidays.

She published four cookbooks in all, and the decision to turn the Creggans Inn into a first-class restaurant occupied much of their time. Later on she published her book on royal families, Crowned Heads, followed by her memoirs, Past Forgetting.

But it was her involvement in the communities, first of Argyll, and later Korcula, which brought out her Fraser qualities to the full. She wanted to improve people’s lives. She never hesitated to voice an opinion, whether about the quality of a Women’s Institute performance, or the standard of service in her restaurant. The café owners of Korcula, castigated for having plastic chairs, quickly upgraded their furniture at her command.

Not everyone responded well, but any lingering resentment usually melted in the all-embracing warmth of her charm. Sustained by her faith, she was imperturbable about her death, brought on by cancer. She insisted on choosing the clothes she wished to be buried in, and she was so pleased with a Christmas present of pink cashmere socks from one of her granddaughters that she insisted that she would wear them too for her last journey. And so she did.

Her husband predeceased her. She is survived by a son and a daughter from her first marriage, and two sons from her second.

Veronica Lady Maclean, writer and traveller, was born on December 2, 1920. She died on January 7, 2005, aged 84.