Tourism chiefs at VisitScotland used a picture of a Glencoe cottage once owned as a holiday home by disgraced BBC celebrity and sex offender Jimmy Savile, to promote tourism in the Highlands.

Savile is thought to have sexually abused more than 450 people over a 60-year period, over 300 of them under 18 and some as young as eight. He owned the cottage for 13 years, from 1998 to 2011 when he died without ever being caught or charged aged 84. It was featured in a highly regarded Louis Theroux documentary in 2000, When Lous met….Jimmy. In a van on the way back from Glencoe Theroux asks why Savile had claimed to the media that he hated children and Savile told him “It’s to put a lot of salacious tabloid people off the hunt”. As the couple said goodbye Theroux claimed that he had “a new-found respect for Jimmy” though he felt he, like most other people, had never got close in the week he had lived with him for the documentary.

At Savile’s death the leader of Leeds City Council, Councillor Keith Wakefield described Savile as “Leeds born and bred, and he remained a Leeds lad all his life”.

VisitScotland have now removed the shot of Savile’s cottage from their website, “in case it caused any offence”.