Cawdor Castle

Cawdor Castle stands in the parish of Cawdor, in the historic county of Nairnshire, now within the Highland council area. The village is called Cawdor in English and Caladair in Scottish Gaelic. It lies about five miles, or eight kilometres, south-southwest of Nairn, and about twelve miles, or nineteen kilometres, east of Inverness. A massive keep with small turrets is the original portion of the house, and later buildings were added to it.

The castle remains in Campbell ownership. One account says it is now the home of Angelika Campbell, Countess Cawdor, stepmother of Colin Campbell, 7th Earl Cawdor. Another account says the present earl still lives in the castle of his Calder ancestors. A third places him, by 2005, at Drynachan Lodge on the estate.

The name Cawdor is the English spelling and pronunciation of the older name Calder. One village account says that in the early nineteenth century the lord, then living in England, changed the name of the castle, the town, and the clan overnight so that it would match the name in the play. The estate account says the spelling Cawdor had long existed as a phonetic variant of Calder, and that it became the standard form in this period, influenced in part by the literary association rather than created solely because of it. Clan Calder is a Highland clan recognised by the Lord Lyon King of Arms.

It has no chief at present, and for that reason it is treated as an armigerous clan. The name is thought to come from early Common Brittonic, meaning hard or violent water, the modern Welsh word for hard being caled, or possibly stony river. The same name appears in other places, including East Calder and West Calder near Edinburgh, and Calderwood near Glasgow. Those places are not this castle.

The wider landscape around the parish has been inhabited for a very long time. The estate account points to the nearby Clava cairns, to standing stones at Auldearn and Balinrait, and to later Pictish remains, as signs of an ancient ceremonial and tribal presence across Moray. Those monuments are not finds from the castle walls. Sherds of three beakers were given to the national museum by an Earl of Cawdor.

Their find-spots are unknown, though it has been said that they probably came from the Cawdor estates. They are not a catalogue of objects dug from the tower.

The title Thane of Calder is said to predate the Norman feudal system. The estate account records the historical Macbeth as thane of Glamis and of Cawdor before he became king of Scots in 1040, and it says the later Calder line emerged from that early medieval thanage in Moray. The castle account says the opposite on the thaneship: Macbeth was never thane of Cawdor, and that title was an invention of the fifteenth-century writer Hector Boece. The castle itself is never directly named in the play, and it was built many years after the life of the eleventh-century king.

The village account says the oldest part of the structure dates from the late fourteenth century and has no predecessor, so the historical authenticity of the play’s version is dubious. A traditional story also places the killing of Duncan at Nairn Castle, a twelfth-century castle of William the Lion whose keepers were the thanes. The king’s own life places that killing somewhere else.

Macbeth, King of Scotland, was Macbethad mac Findláech, anglicised Macbeth MacFinlay, and he died on 15 August 1057. He was nicknamed the Red King. He ruled from 1040 until 1057, in the period when the kingdom is called the Kingdom of Alba. He was the son of Findláech of Moray and may have been a grandson of Malcolm II, presumably through Malcolm’s daughter Donada, which would make him a cousin of Duncan I.

He may also have been a cousin of Thorfinn the Mighty, earl of Orkney and Caithness. The name Mac Bethad, or MacBheatha in modern Gaelic, means son of life. It looks like a patronymic, but it does not mean filiation. It carries the sense of a righteous or religious man.

Another proposed derivation is a corruption of macc-bethad, one of the elect. His full Middle Irish name was Macbethad mac Findláech, MacBheatha mac Fhionnlaigh in modern Scottish Gaelic, and Macbeth MacFinlay in English, also spelled Finley, Findlay, or Findley. Mac Findláech means son of Findláech.

When Cnut the Great came north in 1031 to take the submission of Malcolm II, Macbeth submitted as well. The notice says Malcolm, king of the Scots, submitted and became Cnut’s man, with two other kings, Macbeth and Iehmarc. Some have read that as a sign of Macbeth’s power. Others have read his presence, with Iehmarc, who may be Echmarcach mac Ragnaill, as proof that Malcolm II was overlord of Moray and of the Kingdom of the Isles.

It seems more probable that Macbeth was subject to Malcolm II, who died at Glamis on 25 November 1034. The Prophecy of Berchán, apparently alone among near-contemporary notices, calls Malcolm’s death a kinslaying without naming the killers. Tigernach’s chronicle says only that Máel Coluim son of Cináed, king of Alba, the honour of western Europe, died.

Macbeth became mormaer, or earl, of Moray, a semi-autonomous province, in 1032, and he was probably responsible for the death of the previous mormaer, Gille Coemgáin. His father Findláech had been killed by Gille Coemgáin. Macbeth then married Gille Coemgáin’s widow, Gruoch. They had no children together.

He later accepted her son by Gille Coemgáin, Lulach, as his heir. Gruoch may have had a claim to the throne herself, as granddaughter of either Kenneth II or Kenneth III. It is unclear whether Macbeth married her as an ally sheltering the widow of a kinsman, or as a conqueror claiming the widow of an enemy, or to keep power in Moray and strengthen a claim of his own.

Duncan, Donnchad mac Crínáin, was acclaimed king of Alba on 30 November 1034, apparently without opposition. He appears to have been tánaise ríg, the king in waiting, so his succession has been read as a vindication of tanistry rather than its abandonment. He was a young man in 1034, and even at his death in 1040 his youth was remarked upon. He was not the aged king of the later play.

His early reign seems to have been uneventful. His later reign was not successful. The Prophecy of Berchán calls him the man of many sorrows. In 1039 the Northumbrians attacked Strathclyde, and Duncan’s retaliatory raid on Durham became a disaster.

He survived that defeat. The next year he led an army north into Moray, Macbeth’s domain, apparently on a punitive expedition. He was killed in action at the battle of Bothnagowan, now Pitgaveny, near Elgin, by the men of Moray led by Macbeth, probably on 14 August 1040. The castle account says the same killing happened in battle near Elgin.

The Nairn Castle tradition, that Duncan was killed there by Macbeth, is a different story.

On Duncan’s death Macbeth became king. No resistance is known if the reign was not accepted, and none is known to have occurred at once. In 1045 Duncan’s father, Crínán of Dunkeld, a man of the Scottish branch of the Cenél Conaill and hereditary abbot of Iona, was killed in a battle between two Scottish armies. Duncan’s younger brother Maldred of Allerdale is believed to have died in the same battle, the family fighting Macbeth in defence of Duncan’s young son Máel Coluim, later Malcolm III.

John of Fordun wrote that Duncan’s wife fled Scotland with her children, including the future kings Malcolm III and Donald III, also called Domnall Bán or Donalbane. Places of exile have been proposed from beliefs about whom Duncan married, among them Northumbria and Orkney. E. William Robertson thought the safest place would have been with her kin, or Duncan’s, in Atholl.

After Crínán’s defeat Macbeth was evidently unchallenged. Marianus Scotus tells how the king made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1050, where, Marianus says, he gave money to the poor as if it were seed.

The Orkneyinga saga tells of a dispute between Thorfinn Sigurdsson, earl of Orkney, and a man called Karl Hundason, which began when Karl became king of Scots and claimed Caithness. Karl Hundason is unknown to Scottish and Irish sources. The most common assumption is that the name was an insult, Old Norse for churl, son of a dog, given to Macbeth by his enemies. William Forbes Skene’s suggestion that Karl was Duncan I has been revived.

It has also been suggested that the whole affair is a poetic invention. In the saga, Thorfinn defeated Karl in a sea battle off Deerness, at the east end of the Orkney mainland. Karl’s nephew, Mutatan or Muddan, appointed to rule Caithness, was killed at Thurso by Thorkel the Fosterer. A battle at Tarbat Ness, on the south side of the Dornoch Firth, ended with Karl defeated and fugitive or dead.

Thorfinn then marched south through Scotland as far as Fife, burning and plundering, and a later note claims he won nine Scottish earldoms. Whoever Karl was, the narrative fits a local struggle with a ruler of Moray or Ross, in a longer contest between the Orkney earls and the mormaers of Moray, Sutherland, Ross, and Argyll.

In 1052 Macbeth was involved indirectly in the strife in England between Godwin, earl of Wessex, and Edward the Confessor, when he received a number of Norman exiles at his court. In 1054 Edward’s earl of Northumbria, Siward, led a very large invasion of Scotland. Suthed, Duncan’s widow and Malcolm’s mother, was Northumbrian-born, and a family tie between Siward and Malcolm is probable but not proven. The campaign led to a bloody battle at Dunsinane.

The Annals of Ulster reported 3,000 Scots and 1,500 English dead, which can be taken as meaning very many on both sides. One of Siward’s sons and a son-in-law were among the dead. The result was that one Máel Coluim, son of the king of the Cumbrians, not the future Malcolm III, was restored as ruler of the kingdom of Strathclyde. It may be that the events of 1054 are responsible for the later idea that Malcolm III was put in power by the English.

Macbeth did not survive that invasion for long. He was defeated and mortally wounded or killed by the future Malcolm III, called King Malcolm Ceann-mor, son of Duncan I, on the north side of the Mounth in 1057, after retreating with his men over the Cairnamounth Pass to take his last stand at the battle of Lumphanan. The Prophecy of Berchán has it that he was wounded and died at Scone, sixty miles to the south, some days later. The lead date of his death is 15 August 1057.

He was buried on Iona, the traditional resting place of Scottish kings. His stepson Lulach was installed as king soon afterwards, but Lulach ruled only a few months, and he was killed in 1058 by Malcolm, who succeeded him. One account says Lulach died six months after his stepfather. Malcolm’s descendants ruled Scotland until the late thirteenth century.

No near-contemporary source calls Macbeth a tyrant. The Duan Albanach, surviving in a form from the reign of Malcolm III, calls him Mac Bethad the renowned. The Prophecy of Berchán calls him the generous king of Fortriu, and the red, tall, golden-haired one, pleasant among them, with Scotland brimful west and east during the reign of the furious red one.

By the end of the fourteenth century the lives of Macbeth and Duncan had moved far towards legend, in the histories of John of Fordun and Andrew of Wyntoun. Hector Boece, Walter Bower, and George Buchanan all added to that legend. Hector Boece, also spelled Boyce or Boise, lived from 1465 to 1536. In Latin he was Hector Boecius or Boethius.

He was a philosopher and historian, and the first principal of King’s College in Aberdeen, a predecessor of the university there. He was born in Dundee, schooled there, and educated at the University of St Andrews, then at the University of Paris, where he became a close friend of Erasmus. Both were students at the austere Collège de Montaigu. Boece later became secretary to its reforming master, Jan Standonck.

By 1497 he was a professor of philosophy at that college. In 1500 he was induced to leave Paris for Aberdeen by a generously financed offer to become the first principal of the new university, created at the wish of James IV by William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen, under a papal bull of Pope Alexander VI. He worked with Elphinstone to set the university up. By 1505 regular lectures were taking place at King’s College.

The structure was modelled on Paris and on Orléans. Boece lectured on medicine and on divinity. At the end of 1534 he became rector of Fyvie. He died in Aberdeen two years later, aged 71.

Boece published two books. In 1522 came the lives of the bishops of Murthlack and Aberdeen, later the basis of a poem in Scots by Alexander Gardyne. In 1527 came the Historia Gentis Scotorum, the history of the Scottish people, down to the accession of James III. As published, its coverage stopped at the year 1438.

It was the second scholarly history of the Scots. Its only real predecessor was the compendium of John Mair. It was written in a flowing style, became popular, and brought ecclesiastical preferment and royal favour. By modern standards it is overly patriotic and has many inaccuracies.

The account of Macbeth in particular flattered the antecedents of Boece’s patron, James IV, and greatly maligned the real Macbeth. The work was well received in Europe and in Scotland after translation from Latin into French and then, in 1536, from Latin into Scots by John Bellenden. It includes a glimpse of its own time: the Eurasian beaver, soon to become extinct in Scotland, was still common around Loch Ness. In the early 1530s Giovanni Ferrerio, engaged by Robert Reid of Kinloss Abbey, continued the history for another fifty years, to the end of the reign of James III.

John Lesley and Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie provided further continuations. A metrical translation into Scots by William Stewart, not published until the nineteenth century, also expanded it. Polydore Vergil used Boece for his Historia Anglica of 1534. David Chalmers of Ormond relied on him for the Scottish part of a short history of the French, English, and Scottish monarchies in 1572.

The Historia was translated into English for Raphael Holinshed’s chronicles. George Buchanan made heavy use of Boece in his own history of 1582.

William Shakespeare based his tragedy mainly on Holinshed’s account. Holinshed’s chronicles were published in 1577, and the play was probably first performed in 1606. In the play Macbeth begins as a valiant and loyal general to an elderly King Duncan. Three witches and his wife, Lady Macbeth, manipulate him.

He murders Duncan and takes the throne. The prophecies mislead him, and he becomes a murderous tyrant. Malcolm stages a revolt. A guilt-ridden Lady Macbeth kills herself.

In the battle Macbeth meets Macduff, a refugee nobleman whose wife and children Macbeth had ordered killed. Macbeth at first refuses the duel when he realises he will die if he fights Macduff. When Macduff says that surrender would bring ridicule, Macbeth vows that he will not yield to kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet, to be baited by a rabble’s curse. He fights and is killed and beheaded.

Prince Malcolm becomes king. The likely reason for this unflattering picture is that King James VI and I was descended from Malcolm III through the house of Bruce and his own house of Stewart, whereas Macbeth’s line died out with Lulach. James was also thought to descend from Banquo through Walter Stewart, sixth High Steward of Scotland. The historian Peter Berresford Ellis suggested that the inaccurate portrayal was unintentional, because Shakespeare had only sources written from the point of view of the English and of Anglicised Scots, detached from eleventh-century Scotland, and that the degeneration of Macbeth into a murdering usurper had begun some 350 years after the death at Lumphanan.

A fifth earl of Cawdor is quoted as saying he wished the Bard had never written his damned play.

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor, born about 23 April 1564 and dead on 23 April 1616. He is often called the Bard of Avon, or simply the Bard. His extant works, including collaborations, are some thirty-nine plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. He was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and glover originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, daughter of an affluent landowning family influential among recusant Catholics.

He was baptised on 26 April 1564. The date of birth is unknown, but it is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George’s Day, a date traced to William Oldys and George Steevens and appealing because he died on that date in 1616. He was the third of eight children and the eldest surviving son. Most biographers think he was probably educated at the King’s New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553.

At eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, then twenty-six. The consistory court of the diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. They had three children: Susanna, and the twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592 he began a career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner, or sharer, of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men after James VI of Scotland came to the English throne.

He produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. The early plays were mainly comedies and histories. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Around 1613, at about forty-nine, he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later.

In 1623 John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow actors and friends, published the First Folio, a collected edition of thirty-six plays. Its preface includes Ben Jonson’s line that Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time. The castle is best known for the literary connection, and the story the play tells is highly fictionalised.

The thanes of Calder held lands in Nairnshire under royal authority as the crown consolidated control over Moray after the suppression of the Moray earldom in 1130. The historian William Anderson said the name came to prominence through a French knight, Hugo de Cadella, created thane of Calder, later known as Cawdor. The historian George Fraser Black lists Hugo de Kaledouer as a witness to a charter of land near Montrose in about 1178. The family account says a fortification founded by William the Lion in 1179 was sited to command the ford over the River Nairn near the sea, and that this castle has vanished without trace.

The clan account says Nairn Castle dated from the twelfth century, was built by William the Lion, and had the Calders as its keepers in their role as thanes. The family had another residence at Old Calder, which the exchequer accounts last record as repaired in 1398. Little of that building remains apart from faint crop-marks. A new, more efficient site was then chosen.

The predecessor is also called the House of Calder or Old Cawdor. A lord of the castle said the name Old Cawdor appears on an eighteenth-century estate map, in a field to the southwest of Brackla House, in the area centred on a point well to the northeast of the present tower. That area was later levelled for an airfield. A visit in November 1965 found the tradition of that site.

A survey in May 1978 found no traces of the former House of Calder or Old Cawdor, the seat of the thanes before 1454. Remains of what appears to have been a homestead moat, with a dry ditch and a drawbridge, were still visible in the early eighteenth century. A different account says a previous building, mentioned as Calder Castle in 1398, may have occupied the site of the present castle. The dates and the places do not agree, and both are left standing: a house at Old Calder last repaired in 1398 and gone before 1454, and a suggestion that the 1398 castle may have stood where the tower stands now.

The imposing rectangular tower house consisted of four storeys and a garret, with only one entrance to the outside world. The family account says the present tower was constructed between about 1372 and 1396, and that radiocarbon dating of the holly preserved in the lower chamber suggests a date around 1372. The original tower, four storeys high with a garret and a single entrance, is called the fortified core. The castle’s own account dates the house from the late fourteenth century, built as a private fortress by the thanes, and says this medieval tower house was built for the third thane and has been home to more than twenty-three generations of the Cawdor family.

Another account dates the style of the oldest stonework to approximately 1380. A map of 1906 labels the castle with the year 1393, and also marks a moat and a drawbridge. The late lord’s pamphlet says the castle comprises a tower house with a curtain wall and a dry moat built about 1396, with seventeenth-century additions, and that the tower house was modified about 1456, when the cap-house was added. An architectural survey of the late nineteenth century says the castle consists of mainly seventeenth-century buildings incorporating a keep which probably dates from about 1454, and that most of the features which give the appearance of a fifteenth-century castle, including the drawbridge, the moat, and the entrance gateway, also date from the seventeenth century, although they are probably on the original sites.

The earliest documented date for a licence is 1454, when a licence to fortify was granted to William Calder, sixth thane of Cawdor, or Calder as the name was then often spelled. The licence from James II authorised walls, moats, and defensive works. The designation account calls the core a mid-fifteenth-century five-storey keep which incorporates earlier work, built for the Calders, thanes from the eleventh century, to whom a licence to build a castle was granted in 1454. The clan account says the substantial tower at the heart of the castle was built by the Calders in about 1454, and also that much of the present castle was built by the Calders, with a large keep of four storeys that dates from the fourteenth century, and a courtyard enclosing ranges, reached by a drawbridge across a ditch.

The third Calder, thane of Cawdor, was murdered by Sir Alexander Rait of nearby Rait Castle. That killing is part of the clan story and is not given a year in the account read here.

The iron yett, or gate, is said to have been brought from Lochindorb Castle, which William dismantled around 1455 on the orders of King James II, after it had been forfeited by the earl of Moray. The designation account says the yett is said to have come from Lochindorb, without repeating the year. Lochindorb, from the Gaelic for the loch of the minnows, is a freshwater loch north of Grantown on Spey. An island in it, now thought to have been made by people, holds the ruins of Lochindorb Castle, a former stronghold of Clan Comyn.

Edward I of England stayed in that castle during his campaign of 1303. On 1 November 1573 Agnes Keith wrote to the laird of Kilravock asking him to deal with tenants who were cutting the woods of Lochindorb without permission. The dismantling of about 1455 belongs to the reign of James II, not to Edward’s visit.

James II was king of Scots from 1437 until his death in 1460. He was born at Holyrood Palace on 16 October 1430, the younger of twin sons of James I and Joan Beaufort. The elder twin, Alexander, died before 22 April 1431. James was born with a large red birthmark covering one side of his face, which the Auchinleck chronicle called the fire mark in his face.

He was crowned at Holyrood Abbey on 26 March 1437 by Michael Ochiltree, bishop of Dunblane, when he was six. His minority was turbulent and dominated by successive earls of Douglas. He began his personal rule in 1449. In the parliament of 1445, Archibald and Hugh, younger brothers of William, eighth earl of Douglas, appeared as earls of Moray and Ormond.

Tensions with William led to William’s murder in 1452 and a civil war. In May 1454 the earl of Ross renewed an alliance with the Douglas earl, and Ross’s men plundered the king’s lands. James defeated the Douglas family in 1455, seized its lands, and forced surviving members into exile. A parliament in August 1455 confirmed the victory, disinherited the Douglases for treason, and let the king take their lands.

The king’s third son, David, received the former Douglas earldom of Moray before dying in infancy. James was killed on 3 August 1460 at Roxburgh Castle when a bombard exploded beside him. The licence of 1454 and the forfeiture that freed Lochindorb for dismantling sit inside that reign. The castle account names the forfeited holder as the earl of Moray and does not, in the words read here, name Archibald on the gate itself.

The standing house is a large rectangular courtyard castle of several dates, enclosing that central keep. The north and west wings are described as sixteenth-century work, largely rebuilt from 1760 to 1774 to form a substantial L-plan range linked to the keep by a square stair tower. Further ranges of the middle and later nineteenth century fill the south side of the square and flank a curtain-walled drawbridge on the east. The walls are rubble with ashlar dressings.

The centre keep has a blocked round-headed entrance, now a window, and later regular windows. A crenellated parapet is carried up flush from the wall-head, which is marked by a row of water-spouts. Faceted angle bartizans are corbelled out at each corner, with conical slated roofs and gargoyle spouts. There are wall-head garderobes and a gabled cap-house with end stacks.

The west and north ranges are of three storeys, with pedimented dormers on the north, a vaulted ground floor with slit windows, a rectangular angle bartizan at the northwest, crow-stepped gables, and a corbelled round stair turret with a square crow-stepped attic chamber at the northeast. A projecting stair tower at the southwest has a similar attic chamber. The south and east ranges are of two storeys, dated 1858 and 1884, by the architects Thomas Mackenzie and Alexander Ross, the surname also written MacKenzie. On the east, first-floor windows break the wall-heads in decorative pediments and flank the central drawbridge entrance, which has angle pepperpot bartizans.

Roofs are slate, with crow-steps and corniced stacks.

Inside, the original great hall is on the first floor of the keep, reached by a wheel stair, with a mural garderobe and a corbelled beamed ceiling. The iron yett is at the ground-floor entrance. A blue room has early eighteenth-century panelling and an ornate chimney piece dated 1667, with caryatids, moulded cornices, and access to the bartizan at the northwest angle. There is a large square stair well with stone stairs.

A range of vaulted rooms in the undercroft includes a vaulted kitchen with a well. The house account calls the kitchen a vaulted sixteenth-century kitchen, and also says the old kitchen was in active use between 1640 and 1938. The well was dug straight into the Old Red Sandstone on which the castle is founded and of which it is built. The tapestry bedroom, part of the civilising additions of the seventeenth century, houses rare Flemish tapestries, including arras hangings made in 1682 for that room.

Twelve principal rooms hold collections of tapestries, fine art, furniture, ceramics, and sculpture spanning 3,500 years. The approach has a moat and a drawbridge, turrets, and turnpike stairs.

The heiress of the Calders was Muriel, also spelled Murial in one telling of the pursuit. The estate account says she was born in 1494, the sole heiress. She was the ward of the second earl of Argyll. In 1510 she married his third son, Sir John Campbell of Muckairn.

Their children included Katherine Campbell, countess of Crawford, whose life is given as ending in 1578. Muriel is said to have died in about 1575. She was the last of the Calder chief’s family in the direct line. The second earl, Archibald Campbell, chief of Clan Campbell, was appointed guardian together with Hugh Rose of Kilravock.

He was determined to take the child to Inveraray to be educated as part of his family. Her uncles, Alexander and Hugh Calder, opposed him and pursued the child and her escort into Strathnairn. She was delivered safely to Inveraray, but Campbell of Inverliver, who led the taking of the child, lost all six of his sons in the fighting as the Calders gave chase. She was brought up as a Campbell and married Sir John Campbell, son of the earl of Argyll.

From that marriage the castle and estate were consolidated under Campbell stewardship. The designation account says the property remains in that family as the home of the earls of Cawdor. An architectural account of the late nineteenth century says the castle passed in the seventeenth century to the Campbells of Calder, who are still represented by the earl. Both the 1510 marriage and the seventeenth-century transfer are left as they are told.

John Campbell, third of Cawdor, born about 1576 and dead about 1642, purchased rich lands on Islay. By 1635 a garden had been added. After the Restoration, Sir Hugh Campbell of Cawdor added or improved the north and west ranges, employing the masons James and Robert Nicolson of Nairn. The designation account says much seventeenth-century work was by those masons.

A datestone at the seventeenth-century entrance and pediments, of 1672 and 1674, each carry the initials of Hugh Campbell of Cawdor and Isabel Stewart, his wife. A heraldic panel dated 1672 bears the arms of Sir Hugh Campbell and his wife Lady Henrietta Stewart. The two names for his wife are both left in place. In 1717 articles of agreement between Sir Archibald Campbell of Clunes and John Nicolson, mason in Pyperhill, set out alterations: the two windows in the red room of the tower were to be sloped and built up to match the two below; two windows were to be built in the king’s room on the west side and the position of the door altered; in the laigh dining room the door was to be moved from east to west.

In the 1680s Sir Alexander Campbell, son of Sir Hugh, was stranded at Milford Haven in a storm and met Elizabeth Lort of Stackpole Court. They married, and afterwards the Campbells of Cawdor lived mainly on their estates in Pembrokeshire. Cawdor was home to younger brothers who continued to manage the estates. They built a walled flower garden in 1720 and established extensive woodlands in the later eighteenth century.

The flower garden is also described as originally planted in the seventeenth century, and as an eighteenth-century garden. The wild garden was added in the 1960s. The designed-landscape account says the flower garden was laid out in 1720 and in the early twentieth century was remodelled on a theme of Dante’s passage through hell. There has been a designed landscape here for more than 350 years.

The same summary calls the castle one of the most romantic sixteenth-century Scottish castles, a date that sits beside the fourteenth-century and fifteenth-century dates for the tower. The sessile oaks in Cawdor Wood are believed to be part of an ancient forest and are said to host the largest variety of lichens in the country. Another account says the wood has numerous species of trees and over 100 species of lichen. A news account of 2012 calls Cawdor Wood one of the largest oak woodlands in the north-east of Scotland and a special area of conservation.

The castle grounds and the village houses sit among those trees.

The house survived the wars around it. The family account says that during six hundred years of feuds, kidnappings, and murder, Cawdor as a fortress survived. The battles of Auldearn and of Culloden both happened within eight miles, and the battle of Cromdale not much further. Lord Montrose had the thane’s barnyards burnt to ashes in 1646, after the battle of Auldearn, as a reminder.

During the campaign to subdue the Highlands, a warrant signed by General Monck exempted Cawdor from use as quarters for officers and soldiers. The Glorious Revolution, the massacre of Glencoe, the union with England in 1707, and the Jacobite risings left the castle relatively unscathed, by luck which some supposed the holly had helped. The estate account says the battle of Auldearn was fought nearby during the wars of the three kingdoms, that Montrose’s forces burned the thane’s barns, and that the castle itself survived largely intact. It says the last Jacobite rising ended at Culloden, a short distance away, and that the defeat reshaped Highland society, governance, and landholding, although the castle remained largely unscathed.

Visitors came in the eighteenth century. In 1773 Dr Samuel Johnson and James Boswell were in awe of the old trees. The house account also writes the doctor’s name as Simon Johnson. In 1787 Robert Burns visited on his tour of the Highlands.

John Campbell of Cawdor, a member of parliament, married a daughter of the earl of Carlisle in 1789 and was ennobled as Lord Cawdor in 1796. In 1827 his son was created Earl Cawdor. The estate account places the creation of the earl in 1829, and says the title had evolved from thane of Calder to Lord Calder. The clan account places the first earldom in 1827, following the 1796 peerage of John Campbell of Cawdor.

During the nineteenth century the earls used Cawdor as a summer residence. Thomas Mackenzie and Alexander Ross were commissioned to add the southern and eastern ranges, enclosing a courtyard reached by a drawbridge. Those ranges are the work dated 1858 and 1884.

Robert William Billings drew the castle’s northwest corner for The Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland. A printing of 1901 is the one named beside that view. Billings was born in the Bayswater area of London on 25 July 1812 and died in London on 14 November 1874. He trained as a topographical draughtsman, wrote and illustrated many books, and then concentrated on architectural practice.

At thirteen he was apprenticed for seven years to John Britton. In 1837 he illustrated George Godwin’s history of St Paul’s Cathedral, and two years later, with Frederick Mackenzie, Godwin’s churches of London. He assisted Sir Jeffry Wyattville on drawings of Windsor Castle and prepared views of the ruined Houses of Parliament after the fire. His own books included illustrations of the Temple Church in 1838, Gothic panelling at Brancepeth in 1841 and at Kettering in 1843, and works on Carlisle Cathedral and Durham Cathedral.

The book for which he became best known was the Scottish antiquities, published in four volumes between 1845 and 1852, with 240 illustrations. It was reprinted many times, including 1899, 1900, 1901, 1908, and 1909, and again in the present century. In the 1901 edition it was revealed that the commentaries were written by John Hill Burton, and the edition included a foreword by Robert Rowand Anderson, who placed the book in the front rank of architectural publications. Billings also wrote on the geometric proportions of Gothic architecture, using Carlisle and Worcester, and on geometric tracery.

He later gave up authorship for practice. He restored the chapel of Edinburgh Castle on a government commission, the Douglas Room in Stirling Castle, Gosford House for the earl of Wemyss, Hanbury Hall, Crosby-on-Eden church, and Kemble House and its vicarage. In 1865 he erected a memorial to Peter Nicholson in Carlisle cemetery, a pair of interpenetrating obelisks. From 1865 he lived at Putney, at the Moulinère, a house once occupied by the duchess of Marlborough.

He died there on 14 November 1874. His plates are a record of the castle’s appearance, not a claim that he rebuilt it. The nineteenth-century additions are the work of Mackenzie and Ross.

In the twentieth century John Campbell, fifth earl, moved permanently to Cawdor. His second son, James Campbell, who lived from 1942 to 2019, was born here. John was succeeded by the sixth earl, Hugh John Vaughan Campbell. The sixth earl’s second wife, the dowager countess Angelika, born Countess Lažanský in Bohemia, is the Angelika Campbell, Countess Cawdor of the later dispute.

She was born Countess Angelika Ilona Lazansky von Bukowa, also known as Angelika Lažanská z Bukové a Chyše, on 17 February 1944 at her family’s castle in Chyše. Her father, Count Prokop Lažanský z Bukové, was a Bohemian landowner. Her mother, Countess Ingeborg von Königswald, was a German aviator. She has one sister, Countess Mechtilda.

After the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia her father accepted German citizenship. In 1945, after the war, the family was expelled under the Beneš decrees and settled in Southern Rhodesia, where her father died in 1969. In the 1960s she returned to Czechoslovakia to see her childhood home. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989 she returned again and found the castle in disrepair after forty years of management by the socialist government.

In 1996 a distant cousin, Count Vladimír Lažanský, bought the castle and renovated it. She and her sister visited in 2011 and helped restore the chapel, which her great-grandmother, Countess Terezie Lažanská, had established in 1833.

On 28 December 1979 she married the divorcé Hugh John Vaughan Campbell, sixth earl. She was his second wife, and she took up residence at the castle in Nairnshire. She is a horticulturist and a proponent of organic farming, and she managed the gardens and farms. Her husband died in 1993 and left the Cawdor estate to her instead of to his eldest son, Colin Campbell, 7th Earl Cawdor.

One account of the will calls it secret, and says the son was to derive his income from the estate’s grouse moor, given as sixty square miles, while the dowager took her income from the castle, open to the public in summer, and its adjoining land. The son’s own life says that on his father’s death in 1993 he succeeded as Earl Cawdor of Castlemartin, Viscount Emlyn of Emlyn, and Baron Cawdor of Castlemartin, and that he also inherited a Scottish estate of some 50,000 acres and Cawdor Castle. The castle is one of the locations associated with the play, though the play never names the building.

Colin Robert Vaughan Campbell, seventh earl, was born on 30 June 1962 in Carmarthen. He was styled Viscount Emlyn from 1970 to 1993. He is the elder son of the sixth earl and his first wife, Cathryn Hinde, daughter of Major-General Sir Robert Hinde. He was educated at Eton and at St Peter’s College, Oxford.

He was a member of the House of Lords from 1993 to 1999, and he is vice-lord lieutenant of Nairnshire. He trained as an architect and practised in New York for seven years before marrying and returning. On 21 October 1994, at Adare in County Limerick, he married Lady Isabella Stanhope, youngest daughter of William Stanhope, eleventh earl of Harrington. She was a fashion editor and later an interior decorator.

They have four children: Lady Jean Campbell, born in 1997; James Chester Campbell, Viscount Emlyn, born in 1998; Lady Eleanor Campbell, born in 2000; and Lady Beatrice Campbell, born in 2004. In 2002 the family was described as having three children, two daughters and a son, which matches the three born before Beatrice.

The quarrel between stepmother and stepson is dated in more than one way. One life places her prevention of genetically modified crops in the spring of 2022, and her resignation from the tourism company that October, and then an attempt in November 2002 to evict the stepson. Contemporary accounts place the crop dispute in 2001. In May of that year the earl, called the twenty-fifth thane as well as the seventh earl, had proposed to sow genetically modified oilseed rape for a neighbour.

As a co-director of the estate farming company, the dowager countess refused. She said that if so much as one ear of that rape were to touch the Cawdor seed drill she would resign, and that she was a champion of everything organic. The contract and the sowing were scrapped, at least for that year. She had been a member of Friends of the Earth for more than thirty years, and she said she was at ease with field sports because a grouse or a wild salmon was as organic as could be.

She also said she was no scientist on the subject, that she thought people knew instinctively there was a danger in the methods then used, that farming had lost a great deal since women were less involved in hands-on food production, and that the Highlands then had eighty-five local organic farms and were one of the few places in Britain that remained unpolluted. A castle account reported in 2001 that she had prevented her stepson from sowing genetically modified rapeseed on the estate.

In 2002 she took the earl to court after he moved into the castle while she was away. She had resigned from Cawdor Castle Tourism, which ran the castle under a lease granted by the late earl. One account says she resigned in October 2002 because she felt she could no longer work with him. The earl had issued a message claiming a duty to occupy the castle under the lease for security, and proposing to remain until the lease expired in May 2003.

The lease was said to allow directors of the family company to stay in winter, when the house was closed to the public. He had moved out of a nearby farmhouse and occupied the castle while she was on holiday in America, or in the United States. At the Court of Session in Edinburgh, counsel for the earl said the dispute arose from a raft of disagreements between a stepmother and the son of her husband’s first marriage. The court was told that the earl had jeopardised the collection of art and furniture by switching off an alarm, and that he had lit a fire in the yellow drawing room without realising the chimney was blocked, so that smoke brought fire tenders and the police.

The dowager asked for an interim order giving her possession. After four and a half hours of argument, the judge, Lord Osborne, reserved his decision.

The ruling was only partly in her favour. One account says the thane could stay but his children had to go, and that this meant he would return to humbler dwellings, called a croft on the estate. Another says the judge stopped short of evicting the earl with his wife and three children, but agreed that he had broken the condition that the castle cannot be used as a family home, and that the earl admitted the ruling made it impossible for his family to go on living there, while warning that he would not let matters rest. Another says the earl agreed to move out with his wife and three children, and that the dowager called it despicable that the children had been drawn in.

Lord Osborne ruled that occupation by the children of the seventh earl and by his brother-in-law was a breach of the lease, that the earl was in breach of some terms, and that the breaches could be remedied if he were allowed time to put them right. He also found a breach in the failure to operate the security system installed to protect the works of art. The life of the countess says a judge ruled that she could evict her step-grandchildren but not her stepson, and that ultimately the stepson and his family left the castle and settled at Drynachan Lodge. By 2005 he, his wife, and their children were living at that lodge, described as an eight-bedroom hunting lodge by the River Findhorn.

Ages given for him in the reports of the case include thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and thirty-nine. He was born in June 1962, so those figures do not match one another. In 2021 the countess sold sixty-eight acres of land on the estate.

The name of Calder did not disappear with Muriel. The Calders of Asswanly, also written Aswanley, received lands near Elgin in 1440. In 1686 that family obtained a baronetcy of Nova Scotia. Robert Calder of this branch saw substantial service in the Napoleonic wars.

During the second world war Sir James Calder was an adviser to the Ministry of Supply. Douglas Calder was president of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and in 1974 was appointed director of planning for the newly created Highland region. Other Calder houses are not this castle. Asloun Castle, two miles southwest of Alford in Aberdeenshire, was a sixteenth-century Z-plan tower of which little remains.

The Calders held it before it passed to Clan Forbes. Aswanley House, seven miles west of Huntly, was held by the Calders from 1440 and was sold in 1768 to the Duffs of Braco because of debt.

The castle was designated a Category A listed building on 26 January 1971, and one copy of the same designation gives the date as 25 January 1971. The grid reference of the tower is given as NH 84718 49870, and also as NH 84718 49869. A visit on 21 July 1971 found the castle still inhabited and in excellent condition. The grounds were added to the national inventory of significant gardens and designed landscapes on 1 July 1987.

The architectural interest of that landscape is classed as outstanding, because it is the setting of the Category A house. The archaeological interest was not assessed. The recorded centre of the designed landscape lies south of the tower. No world-heritage inscription was stated for this castle in the records read here.

No excavation of the tower itself was described in those records, and no find list from the walls was published in them. The nearby enclosure at Easter Galcantray, southwest of the village, is a different place. It was identified in 1984 from the air as a strong candidate for a Roman fort. Trial digging in 1985 opened a large ditch of Roman type, about four metres wide and three metres deep, part of a gate with three post-holes about thirty centimetres square, and a small piece of Roman coarse ware with burnt material at the bottom of the ditch.

The village account says the digging ran from 1985 to 1988, that the coarse ware has a fabric very like pottery from Inchtuthil, and that charcoal from demolition deposits in the western ditch was radiocarbon-dated to the years 80 to 130, a possible construction date during the campaign of Agricola. Further seasons confirmed the Roman appearance of the ditch and evidence of manual backfilling, many square post-holes massively chocked in the interior, and pottery that was easily identifiable as medieval. A blue melon bead was found in one post-hole. A corner tower was confirmed, charcoal was taken for dating, and a resistivity survey showed an oblique defensive structure shielding the entrance.

A cobbled road-like surface lay behind the southern ditch, and the post-hole pattern outlined a building some twenty-one metres long. Work in 1990 uncovered many additional post-holes. The event as a whole is dated from 1985 to 1990, and twelve trenches are mentioned. These finds belong to Easter Galcantray, not to the holly tree or the keep.

In January 2012 the village was cited in an examination of the Highland-wide local development plan as an example of trees and houses standing together. The estate, for the trustees of the Cawdor Scottish Discretionary Trust, argued that the plan favoured preserving trees and discouraged new planting, and that trees should be removable for housing if more were planted elsewhere. The village then had about fifty homes. Only one new property had been completed in the previous ten years, with two others under construction.

The plan proposed 285 new houses. Reporters noted public concern that the village would expand too quickly and that some properties could affect Cawdor Wood. That planning argument is not an excavation of the castle.

What the place was for changed with each phase, and the sources support the change without inventing a use. It was a thane’s fortress commanding a route through Nairnshire after an older house at Old Calder, or a vanished castle of William the Lion at the ford, had ceased to serve. The tower, whenever its first stones were laid, was a private stronghold with one entrance, a yett, and a well in the rock. The 1454 licence armed it with walls and moats in the years when James II was breaking the Douglas earls, and the gate from Lochindorb is the physical trace of that forfeiture.

The Campbell marriage of 1510 moved the lordship from Clan Calder to Clan Campbell, by the taking of a child heiress whose uncles fought and lost sons to stop it. Later ranges turned the keep into a courtyard house, a summer residence of earls who lived much of the year in Pembrokeshire, and then a permanent home again in the twentieth century. The play attached a thane’s title the historical king may never have held, or may have held, according to which account is followed, and it attached that title to a building which did not exist in his lifetime. The inheritance after 1993 split the castle from the eldest son and put the dowager and the seventh earl in court over who might sleep there.

The house is still lived in, and it is opened to visitors for part of the year. The holly in the lowest room, dead since about 1372, is the one object under the tower that the scientific tests dated.