# Crathes Castle

16th century castle in northeast Scotland

Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1553 CE

## Story

• Crathes Castle is a harled granite tower near Banchory, begun in 1553 and finished in 1596 for the Burnetts of Leys.
• The family had held the land since a grant from Robert the Bruce in 1323, and earlier lived on a crannog in the Loch of Leys.
• Painted ceilings of 1597 and 1602 survive, with the Horn of Leys in the hall, and the yew hedges are dated anywhere from 1702 to the 1850s.
• A fire on 6 January 1966 destroyed part of the Queen Anne wing, which Schomberg Scott rebuilt at two storeys.
• Warren Field, on the estate, is a Mesolithic line of twelve pits read as a calendar of about 8000 BC.

## Visiting

Tickets are purchased from the shop, and pre-booking is not possible. Tickets admit visitors to the castle every 10 minutes on a first-come, first-served basis. From 1 November to 24 December the castle, shop, café and garden open daily from 10.00 to 16.00. The castle, shop, café and garden are closed on 25, 26 and 27 December.
They open daily from 10.00 to 16.00 from 28 December to 31 December. The castle, shop, café and garden are closed on each day from 1 January to 7 January 2027. From 8 January to 31 January they open from 10.00 to 16.00 on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. From 1 February to 31 March, and from 1 April to 30 June, they open daily from 10.00 to 16.00.
From 1 July to 29 August they open daily from 10.00 to 17.00. From 30 August to 31 October they open daily from 10.00 to 16.00. The grounds are open daily from dawn to dusk. Wild Wood Adventure Play is closed on each day from 26 October to 25 March 2027, and when it is open the hours are weather dependent.
From 26 March to 30 June, and from 30 August to 31 October, the play area opens from 11.00 to 15.30 on Saturday and Sunday. From 1 July to 29 August the play area is open daily from 11.00 to 15.30. Adult admission is £18, concession admission is £14, family admission is £40.50, one-adult family admission is £34.50, and Young Scot admission is £1. With the optional donation included, adult admission is £19.80, concession admission is £15.40, family admission is £44.55, and one-adult family admission is £37.95.
An adult garden token for admission is £8, or £8.80 with the donation included. Child admission to Wild Wood Adventure Play is £5, and children under 4 are admitted free. Admission is free for members. Admission to the car park is £5, and car park admission is free for members.
Only assistance dogs are allowed to enter the castle, the walled garden and the play area. Visitors may not enter the upper floors except by stairs, while the ground floor of the castle is wheelchair accessible. Wheelchair users are allowed to enter most of the walled garden. Drone flying is not allowed without prior permission.

## History

Crathes Castle is a harled granite tower near Banchory, in the parish of Banchory-Ternan, in what was Kincardineshire. The Burnetts of Leys held it from the sixteenth century into the middle of the twentieth, a span given both as more than three hundred and fifty years and as almost four hundred. The house is an L-plan of four storeys and an attic, with a vaulted basement, turrets, gargoyles and an iron yett in the re-entrant angle. Panels on the walls are dated 1553 and 1596, and a vault boss is dated 1554.

The Deeside line begins with Alexander Burnard, rewarded in 1323 by Robert the Bruce with land at Banchory and the office of royal forester of Drum. A charter of 28 March 1324 added Kilhenach, Clerech and other lands. The family first lived on a crannog in the Loch of Leys, a timber island of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the Late Middle Ages. A marriage in 1543, of Alexander Burnett to Janet Hamilton, brought church lands as a dowry and is tied to the start of the stone tower.

Work ran intermittently from 1553 to 1596, carried out by masons of the Bell family, and was delayed during the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots. One account has the ninth lord begin the house and his great-grandson, Alexander Burnett of Leys, finish it. Another has Alexander build it and a grandson complete it. Alexander, the twelfth laird, died on 5 July 1619, and his marriage to Katherine Gordon of Lesmoir is marked by a bed and two chairs of 1597 carved with their initials.

Painted ceilings survive in the Chamber of the Muses, the Chamber of Nine Worthies and the Green Lady's Room, and the paintings are dated 1597 and 1602. Four rooms above the hall are also said to keep late sixteenth-century painting. The ceilings were noticed under Georgian plaster in 1877 and uncovered again in 1913. The Horn of Leys, a jewelled ivory horn, hangs over the hall fireplace and is given both as a fourteenth-century gift from Robert the Bruce and as a gift made when the charter was granted.

Sir Thomas Burnett, 1st Baronet, finished Muchalls Castle in 1627, was knighted in 1620, and received a Nova Scotia baronetcy on 21 April 1626. He died on 27 June 1653. In 1644 he asked the marquess of Montrose to supper at Crathes and offered arms, horses and 5,000 merks. Montrose took the arms and horses and refused the money.

A later wing is called the Queen Anne wing. It is dated both to 1663, when the third baronet inherited and is said to have needed room for twenty-one children, and to the early eighteenth century. That later dating falls in the reign of Anne, Queen of Great Britain. The two datings are both on record.

Sir Robert, who succeeded in 1876, returned from ranching in California with his American wife Matilda and in 1877 refitted the great hall in a faux-medieval style. Gertrude Jekyll is placed in the garden both in about 1895 and in the 1930s. Sir James Burnett, 13th Baronet, and his wife Sybil remade the flower garden from 1926. He gave the castle to the National Trust for Scotland in 1951, or in 1952, a year before his death on 13 August 1953.

The family went on living in the house after the gift. The great hall was stripped to bare stone in 1953. A fire on 6 January 1966 burned the Queen Anne wing, left James Cecil Burnett with a stump of the service wing, and destroyed the rooms of Jean Dodds. Schomberg Scott had the wing rebuilt at two storeys and had the Victorian wing demolished.

The insurance payment was 65,000 pounds, and half of it was spent on a new house for the family away from the castle. Stone from the burnt wing was reused in 1986 at Strathieburn House in Durris. The yew hedges are dated to 1702, to the early eighteenth century, to the 1850s, and to planting from 1876. The designed landscape is given as 724 acres, as 240 hectares, and as 272 hectares.

The tower was listed in category A on 18 August 1972, and also on 17 August 1972. The garden entered the inventory of gardens and designed landscapes on 1 July 1987. Digs from 1995 to 2022 found an earlier mortar floor, a rare ice-making system, a lost south courtyard, flints, and demolition debris from the burnt wing. A brief in 2023 watched the faces of the tower.

Warren Field, on the estate, is a line of twelve Mesolithic pits, seen from the air in 1976 and excavated from 2004. It has been read as a lunar or lunisolar calendar of about 8000 BC, with a midwinter alignment toward the Slug Road pass, nearly five thousand years older than the calendars of Mesopotamia. Balbridie, a Neolithic long house on the south bank of the Dee, is a separate site revealed in the same dry summer of 1976. The Royal Deeside Railway runs from Milton of Crathes on the old line toward Ballater, and the Dee itself rises in the Cairngorms National Park, upstream of the castle.

## Photographs

- [View of Crathes Castle from the garden — Oyoyoy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Crathes_Castle_from_garden.jpg)
- [Crathes Castle, Scotland. — R. W. Billings](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Crathes-Castle_1.jpg)
- [Crathes Castle, Scotland. — R. W. Billings](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Crathes-Castle_2.jpg)
- [Crathes Castle, Scotland. — R. W. Billings](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Crathes-Castle_3.jpg)
- [Crathes Castle. Home of the family of Burnett of Leys since the 14th century, the present building dates from the 16th century. The castle and its equally — Anne Burgess](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Crathes_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3091.jpg)
- [Crathes Castle With the ancient yew hedge to the left. Some traces of recent snow still lying around. — Stanley Howe](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Crathes_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_254112.jpg)
- [A view from Crathes Castle. Over gardens and carpark. — Stanley Howe](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/A_view_from_Crathes_Castle._-_geograph.org.uk_-_266621.jpg)
- [Crathes castle Crathes is a magnificent 16th century tower house. It lies 15 miles from Aberdeen, just east of Banchory. — Carol Walker](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Crathes_castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_293173.jpg)
- [A back entrance to Crathes Castle Via an avenue from The Neuk. — Stanley Howe](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/A_back_entrance_to_Crathes_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_422765.jpg)
- [Crathes Castle Crathes Castle and its magnificent gardens are maintained by the National Trust for Scotland — Bill Harrison](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Crathes_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_477241.jpg)

## Sources

- [Crathes Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crathes_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [House of Burnett](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Burnett) — Wikipedia
- [Alexander Burnett of Leys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Burnett_of_Leys) — Wikipedia
- [Sir Thomas Burnett, 1st Baronet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Thomas_Burnett,_1st_Baronet) — Wikipedia
- [Sir James Burnett, 13th Baronet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_James_Burnett,_13th_Baronet) — Wikipedia
- [Robert the Bruce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_the_Bruce) — Wikipedia
- [Mary, Queen of Scots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Queen_of_Scots) — Wikipedia
- [Anne, Queen of Great Britain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne,_Queen_of_Great_Britain) — Wikipedia
- [Schomberg Scott](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schomberg_Scott) — Wikipedia
- [Warren Field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Field) — Wikipedia
- [Balbridie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balbridie) — Wikipedia
- [Late Middle Ages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Middle_Ages) — Wikipedia
- [Cairngorms National Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairngorms_National_Park) — Wikipedia
- [Royal Deeside Railway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Deeside_Railway) — Wikipedia
- [Yonder Bognie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonder_Bognie) — Wikipedia
- [Ythan Wells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ythan_Wells) — Wikipedia
- [Muchalls Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muchalls_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Monboddo House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monboddo_House) — Wikipedia
- [Scottish Renaissance painted ceilings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Renaissance_painted_ceilings) — Wikipedia
- [Banchory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banchory) — Wikipedia
- [Crathes Castle, Garden and Estate](https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/crathes-castle) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Planning your visit to Crathes Castle](https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/crathes-castle/planning-your-visit) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Crathes Castle garden inventory GDL00119](https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/apex/f?p=1505:300:::::VIEWTYPE,VIEWREF:designation,GDL00119) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Crathes Castle listing LB3262](https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/apex/f?p=1505:300:::::VIEWTYPE,VIEWREF:designation,LB3262) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Crathes Castle designation LB3262](https://www.trove.scot/designation/LB3262) — Trove
- [Building record MAB41489 Crathes Castle](https://her.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/Monument/MAB41489) — Aberdeenshire Council Historic Environment Record
- [Time and a Place: a luni-solar time-reckoner from 8th millennium BC Scotland](https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue34/gaffney_index.html) — Internet Archaeology
- [The Beginning of Time?](https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news-archive/2013/the-beginning-of-time) — University of Birmingham
- [Mesolithic Timelords: a hunter-gatherer calendar at Warren Field](https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/news/mesolithic-timelords-a-monumental-hunter-gatherer-calendar-at-warren-field-scotland.htm) — Current Archaeology
- [Crathes Castle from garden.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crathes_Castle_from_garden.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Crathes-Castle 1.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crathes-Castle_1.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Crathes-Castle 2.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crathes-Castle_2.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Crathes-Castle 3.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crathes-Castle_3.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Crathes Castle - geograph.org.uk - 3091.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crathes_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3091.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Crathes Castle - geograph.org.uk - 254112.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crathes_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_254112.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [A view from Crathes Castle. - geograph.org.uk - 266621.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_view_from_Crathes_Castle._-_geograph.org.uk_-_266621.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Crathes castle - geograph.org.uk - 293173.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crathes_castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_293173.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [A back entrance to Crathes Castle - geograph.org.uk - 422765.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_back_entrance_to_Crathes_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_422765.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Crathes Castle - geograph.org.uk - 477241.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crathes_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_477241.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Crathes Castle stands near Banchory in Aberdeenshire, in the historic county of Kincardineshire and in the parish of Banchory-Ternan. The name is pronounced KRATH-iss. It is a harled tower house of the sixteenth century, built for the Burnetts of Leys, and the family held it for almost four hundred years in one account and for more than three hundred and fifty years in others. The castle and grounds are now owned and managed by the National Trust for Scotland and are open to the public. The building is granite, with rounded angles, and it rises four storeys and an attic. The lower storeys are plain. Above the first floor there is a profusion of corbelling, a stringcourse, angle turrets and stair turrets, heraldic decoration, gargoyles and gabling. The entrance, in the re-entrant angle, is protected by an iron yett. The same tower is a modified L-plan, pinnacled and turreted, of four storeys, with a vaulted basement and a stair in the salient angle. Inset panels are dated 1553 and 1596. A three-storey east wing is given as early eighteenth century, with additions dated 1894.

The House of Burnett, also spelled Burnet, Burnette, Burnard and Bernard, is a Lowland and Border family of several branches. The chief of the name and arms is James Comyn Amherst Burnett of Leys, also given as James C. A. Burnett of Leys. Whether the name is Saxon or Norman is uncertain. One suggestion derives it from the Old French burnete, or brunette, a diminutive of brun, meaning brown. Another derives it from burnete, a dark brown wool cloth. A further suggestion takes it from the English surname Burnard, itself from the Anglo-Saxon name Beornheard. Early documents use Burnet and Burnard, or Bernard, for the same family and sometimes for the same person. The de Bernard family is thought to have come north with the return of David I of Scotland and to have settled in Roxburghshire. Burnards are documented in England from the Norman Conquest of 1066, in the Domesday Book, in the chartulary of St Neots Priory, and in charters of Waltham Abbey. Roger Burnard was the Domesday tenant of Alrichesey and held a manor in the hundred of Rodedie in Hampshire and the manors of Celdretone and Coteford in Wiltshire, all of William de Ow. He, his wife Margaret, his son Odo and a daughter Magilia appear in charters of St Neots.

Among those who came north with David I were Burnards who settled in Roxburghshire and held the barony of Farningdoun, also called Fairnington. They were benefactors of Melrose Abbey. About 1200 Roger Burnard of Farningdoun made two grants of land in that barony, witnessed by his sons Geoffrey, Walter, Ralph and Richard. Ralph, his son and heir, appears in the episcopal records of Glasgow in 1208 providing peat as fuel to the bishop. In 1252 Richard Burnard of Farningdoun sold the Eastmeadow of Farningdoun to Melrose, confirmed that year by a charter of Alexander III of Scotland. After 1381 the link between the Burnards and Farningdoun seems to have been lost. Other branches held Burnetland in Peeblesshire, later Barns. A Robert de Burnetland witnessed the foundation charter of Selkirk Abbey by David I before he became king. The will of William Burnet of Barns, treasurer-clerk of Scotland, dated 30 April 1656, says his predecessors had held Barns for three hundred years, which would place that holding by at least 1356. The Barns estate was sold in 1838. At times Burnet of Barns and the family of Leys contended for the chiefship. John Burnard of Ardross in Fife and of lands in Currie in Midlothian went south with David II of Scotland in 1346, was badly wounded at the fort of Liddell, and died of his wounds at Roxburgh Castle. Because Roxburgh then surrendered, he was taken for a traitor and his lands were given to Alexander Maitland. When David II was released, a royal charter restored them to John's nearest kinsman, William of Dishington. The Dishingtons held them until about 1700.

Alexander Burnard, almost certainly of Farningdoun, is called the first of the Deeside Burnards, later the Burnetts. He was an adherent of Robert the Bruce. For his services he was rewarded in 1323 with land in Banchory and the office of royal forester of Drum. He also received a charter, dated 28 March 1324, of the lands of Kilhenach, Clerech and other lands in Aberdeenshire. That was about the time the family first lived on an artificial island, a crannog, on the Loch of Leys. The castle account says the land was a gift from Robert the Bruce in 1323, and that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Burnetts of Leys built a timber fortress on an island they made in a nearby bog. A crannog of that kind was common in the Late Middle Ages. The earliest home is also given simply as the Island of Leys. The present estate is said once to have been part of the royal forest of Drum, which matches the forester's office. The family history says that over the next three centuries the Burnetts gained standing by connections with the church and by grants of land. John Burnet of Leyis, the fifth laird, was the first of this line to be styled of Leys, a distinction then used both for the lands and for the family. His son, Alexander Burnet of Leys, was the first to be called baron of Leys, in the reigns of James II of Scotland, James III and James IV.

Robert the Bruce, also Robert I, was born on 11 July 1274 and died on 7 June 1329, the day also given simply as June 1329. He was king of Scots from 1306 until his death. His place of birth is not known for certain. He was a fourth-great-grandson of David I, and his grandfather Robert de Brus, fifth lord of Annandale, was a claimant in the Great Cause. As earl of Carrick he supported his family's claim and took part in William Wallace's campaign against Edward I of England. In 1298 he was a guardian of Scotland with John Comyn of Badenoch and William Lamberton, bishop of St Andrews. He resigned in 1300 amid quarrels with Comyn and talk of restoring John Balliol. He submitted to Edward I in 1302. After his father's death he inherited the family claim. His part in the killing of John Comyn in February 1306 brought excommunication by Pope Clement V, though Robert Wishart, bishop of Glasgow, absolved him. He was crowned on 25 March 1306. Edward I's forces beat him at the Battle of Methven. He fled, returned in 1307, defeated an English army at Loudoun Hill, and fought a guerrilla war. In 1320 the Scottish nobility sent the Declaration of Arbroath to Pope John XXII, naming Robert as rightful monarch and Scotland as an independent kingdom. In 1324 the pope recognised Robert I as king of an independent Scotland. In 1326 the Franco-Scottish alliance was renewed in the Treaty of Corbeil. In 1327 the English deposed Edward II in favour of his son Edward III, and peace followed in the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton in 1328, by which Edward III renounced all claims to sovereignty over Scotland. Robert died in June 1329 and was succeeded by his son David II. His body was buried at Dunfermline Abbey, his heart at Melrose Abbey, and his internal organs were placed in St Serf's Church at Dumbarton. The Banchory grant of 1323 and the charter of 28 March 1324 therefore fall in the last years of his reign, after Arbroath and in the year of papal recognition. No account read here says that he visited the loch.

The Late Middle Ages, in the European scheme, run from 1300 to 1500, after the High Middle Ages and before early modern Europe and, in much of Europe, the Renaissance. Around 1350 a long growth stopped. Famine and plague, including the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317 and the Black Death, cut the population to about half. With that came unrest and war: the Jacquerie, the Peasants' Revolt, and the Hundred Years' War. The Western Schism broke the unity of the church for a time. Together these are sometimes called the crisis of the late Middle Ages. The same century saw the start of the Italian Renaissance, the spread of printing, and, at the end of the period, the voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1492 and Vasco da Gama in 1498. Leonardo Bruni used a three-part division of history in 1442, Flavio Biondo a similar frame between 1439 and 1453, and Christoph Cellarius made the ancient, medieval and modern division standard in 1683. Jacob Burckhardt later put the heart of the Renaissance in Italy. None of those continental events is recorded at the Loch of Leys. What the castle account does say is that the timber island belongs to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, inside that late medieval span, and that a crannog was then a common form of fortification.

The move from the loch to the present tower is tied to a marriage and a dowry. One record says that after the marriage in 1543 of Alexander Burnett to Janet Hamilton, daughter of Canon Hamilton of the abbey of Arbroath, church lands in the dowry let work begin on a new tower at Crathes. The work was carried out intermittently between 1553 and 1596 by one of the Bell family of masons, also called the Bell brothers, master masons. The family history names Alexander Burnet of Leys, the ninth lord of Leys, as the man who began the castle in 1553, and his great-grandson, another Alexander, the twelfth lord, as the man who finished it in 1596. A garden inventory says the castle was built in the second half of the sixteenth century by Alexander Burnett and completed by his grandson, who had inherited substantial church property from his mother. The castle's own account says construction of the present tower began in 1553, was delayed several times by political problems during the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, and was completed in 1596 by Alexander Burnett of Leys. A period note on the building says the tower bears the dates 1553, a vault boss of 1554, and completion in 1596. The grandson of one account and the great-grandson of another are not the same relationship, and the finishing hand is in one place Alexander himself and in another his descendant. All of the dated accounts still put the start at 1553 and the finish at 1596.

Mary, Queen of Scots, also Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, lived from 8 December 1542 to 8 February 1587. She was queen of Scotland from 14 December 1542 until her forced abdication on 24 July 1567. She was the only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scotland, and she was six days old when he died. Regents governed during her childhood, first James Hamilton, earl of Arran, then her mother Mary of Guise. In 1548 she was betrothed to Francis, dauphin of France, and was sent to France to be safe from English forces in the Rough Wooing. She married Francis in 1558, was queen consort of France from his accession in 1559 until his death in December 1560, and returned to Scotland in August 1561. John Knox questioned whether her subjects owed her obedience. She accepted the religious settlement she found, kept advisers including her half-brother James Stewart, first earl of Moray, and William Maitland of Lethington, and ruled as a Catholic monarch in a Protestant kingdom. In 1565 she married her half-cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. They had a son, James. The marriage soured after Darnley arranged the murder of her secretary David Rizzio. In February 1567 Darnley's house was blown up and he was found murdered in the garden. James Hepburn, fourth earl of Bothwell, was widely believed to have arranged the death, was acquitted in April 1567, and married Mary the next month. An uprising followed. She was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle and in July 1567 abdicated in favour of her one-year-old son, James VI. After a failed attempt to regain the throne she fled to her cousin Elizabeth I of England. As a great-granddaughter of Henry VII she had claimed Elizabeth's throne, and many English Catholics, including those in the Rising of the North, treated her as the legitimate sovereign. Elizabeth confined her for eighteen and a half years. In 1586 she was found guilty of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth, and she was beheaded the next year at Fotheringhay Castle. The tower at Crathes was rising through the whole of her personal rule and for almost thirty years after her abdication. The castle account attributes the delays to political problems in her reign. It does not name Arran, Knox, Darnley, Rizzio, Bothwell or the abdication as the cause of any particular stoppage.

Alexander Burnett, twelfth laird of Leys, died on 5 July 1619. He was laird of Crathes in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and is credited with finishing the castle in 1596. He married Katherine Gordon of Lesmoir. Two caquetoire chairs and a bed at Crathes are carved with their initials and heraldry, and the chairs and bed are dated 1597. A photograph of one chair is captioned as made for Katherine Gordon in 1597. Their daughter Helen married John, laird of Allardice, on 3 September 1617. Alexander acquired Muchalls Castle and began its early seventeenth-century reconstruction. The date of that acquisition is about 1600 in his own account and in the family history, and 1588 in the account of his son. After Alexander's death in 1619, Muchalls was finished by that son. The family history says ownership of Muchalls left the Burnetts of Leys about 1882.

The rooms still carry painted timber. Original Scottish Renaissance painted ceilings survive in the Chamber of the Muses, the Chamber of Nine Worthies and the Green Lady's Room. Another account says four rooms above the hall keep their original late sixteenth-century painted ceilings, and the wider study of such ceilings dates the paintings at Crathes to 1597 and 1602 and calls them probably the best known. Records exist of over a hundred Scottish painted ceilings, and a much smaller number survive in place. Most were painted on the boards and joists of the floor above. Attic rooms or galleries were lined with thin pine and painted. Oak and pine came from Denmark-Norway, Sweden and further off, and were known as Eastland timber. Plaster later replaced the fashion, and painted boards were sometimes broken up as laths. At Crathes, several painted beam ceilings were long covered by Georgian plaster. They were noticed during works in 1877 and covered again, then re-exposed in 1913 when that plaster was taken off. The vaulted ground floor holds kitchens, a store and a small prison. The high hall is a vaulted room with three stone bosses carved with Hamilton cinquefoils and Burnett holly leaves. Over the fireplace hangs a jewelled ivory horn, the Horn of Leys. One account says it was presented to Alexander Burnett by the Bruce when he received the charter. The trust's account says the horn was given to the Burnett family in the fourteenth century by Robert the Bruce. The first Alexander of the loch and the Alexander who finished the tower are different men, and the two wordings of the gift do not name the same generation.

Muchalls Castle stands above the North Sea in Kincardine and Mearns. Its lower course is a Romanesque, double-groined tower of the thirteenth century built by the Frasers of Muchalls, and the same level is also called the fourteenth-century ground floor of that Fraser house. On it the Burnetts built the remaining four storeys. Alexander Burnett of Leys began the upper castle and Sir Thomas Burnett, 1st Baronet, finished it in 1627. The plan is an L, with a further wing at the west end. In 1638 a Covenanter gathering there entered national history. Plaster ceilings in the principal drawing rooms, dated 1624, are counted among the three finest in Scotland, with Burnett heraldry, the arms of relations and friends, and biblical figures. The overmantel of the great hall fireplace has the arms of King James VI between egyptianesque figures. The medieval floor has a dungeon, a guard room, storerooms, a waiting chamber and a kitchen.

Sir Thomas Burnett, 1st Baronet, of Leys died on 27 June 1653. He was the eldest surviving son of Alexander Burnett of Leys and of Katherine, eldest daughter of Alexander Gordon of Lesmoir. As Thomas Burnaetus de Leyes he matriculated at King's College, Aberdeen, in 1603. In sasines of 1604 and 1606 he is his father's son and heir apparent. He succeeded in 1619 to the feudal barony of Leys. He was an honorary burgess of Aberdeen in 1619, was knighted in 1620, and was one of the earliest baronets of Nova Scotia, by a patent dated at Holyroodhouse on 21 April 1626. A garden inventory prints the years 1619 to 1653 beside his title, which matches succession and death rather than a recorded birth. In 1619, before his father died, King James VI of Scotland named him, at the instance of Bishop Patrick Forbes, as a commissioner to visit the universities of Aberdeen. An act of 1621 for the plantation of new kirks records his petition for a church at Fetteresso, the parish of Muchalls, and the castle there, begun by his father, was finished by Sir Thomas in 1627. He opposed the Episcopalian court party and supported the Solemn League and Covenant. He was a commissioner for the Tables north of the Grampians. In early July 1638 he and others were told in Aberdeen that they had no legal power to demand subscriptions. They returned on the 20th of that month under the earl of Montrose, then a Covenanter, with preachers who were refused the city pulpits. The university called the Covenant unlawful, and the preachers Henderson, Dickson and Cant withdrew for a time to Muchalls. In March 1639 some 11,000 men under Montrose and Huntly were ordered to reduce the north. On 12 March 1639 Montrose and Argyll wrote to reassure Sir Thomas. Aberdeen admitted the army. Sir Thomas sat on a tribunal from 2 April in Greyfriars Church to force opponents to subscribe. Viscount Aboyne's part of the army then camped at Muchalls and ransacked Burnett's property. In 1644, under the earl of Argyll and the Earl Marischal, a committee of the estates for northern business heard a petition from Lord Fraser, Sir Thomas, Patrick Leslie the provost, and others, about losses from quartering. Later that year Montrose, now a marquess and opposed to the Covenant, was summoned by Sir Thomas to supper at Crathes. Sir Thomas offered arms, horses and 5,000 merks. Montrose took the arms and horses and refused the money. Sir Thomas and his son were afterwards the only known Covenanters whom the marquess protected. Sir Thomas armed half his retainers against robber bands, asked parliament for relief from excise and from taxation for armies sent to England, was refused, sent his silver plate to Edinburgh to be melted as a loan, and also lent money to the marquess of Argyll. After Charles II was proclaimed in Scotland, a complaint of 1649 said Sir Thomas was owed 67,000 pounds for supporting the cause. Parliament exempted him from further levies and recommended repayment. It is unclear that he was paid. A garden inventory says that although he had parliamentarian leanings he did not join in the Civil War, and so avoided damage to his property. The supper with Montrose and the loans sit beside that statement rather than cancelling it.

There were no known seals of Burnett of Leys before 1621. In 1550 Burnet of Burnetland, later Barns, asked the Lord Lyon King of Arms to change his motto to one already used by Burnett of Leys, Virescit vulnere virtus. The Leys lord then began to use Alterius non sit qui potest esse suus.

The next great change to the house was the wing. When Sir Thomas, the third baronet, inherited in 1663, he is said to have extended the castle by adding the Queen Anne wing, partly to house his twenty-one children. After the Acts of Union in 1707 he served in the Westminster parliament. The same inventory, in its description of the architecture, says the wing was added early in the eighteenth century. The listing says the same of a three-storey east wing. A period note says the south wing was added in the early eighteenth century, enlarged in 1894, burnt in 1966 and rebuilt. The name Queen Anne belongs to Anne, Queen of Great Britain, who was born on 6 February 1665 and died on 1 August 1714. She was queen of England, Scotland and Ireland from 8 March 1702, and queen of Great Britain and Ireland after the Acts of Union of 1707, until her death. She was born in the reign of her uncle Charles II. Her father was James, Charles's brother and heir. She and her sister Mary were raised as Anglicans. Mary married William III of Orange in 1677. Anne married Prince George of Denmark in 1683. James succeeded in 1685 and was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Mary and William became joint monarchs. After Mary died in 1694, William reigned alone until 1702, when Anne succeeded. A wing dated to 1663 would have been begun two years before Anne was born and decades before her reign. A wing dated to the early eighteenth century would fall in her reign, which is the only dating that explains the name by the queen then on the throne. Both datings are in the records.

Sir Alexander, the fourth baronet, inherited in 1714. By about 1750 a formal landscape surrounded the castle, visible on General Roy's plan, though it is not known which laird laid it out. His son succeeded in 1758 and died a year later without a direct heir. After a legal struggle of seven years, Sir Thomas Burnett of Criggie succeeded. It is thought that in the 1760s he asked Robert Robinson to landscape the park. His son altered the castle and began changes in the grounds, and died in 1837. Three sons inherited in turn. The grandson, Sir Robert, seventh baronet, was a rancher in California. He succeeded in 1876, one account says, and returned with his American wife. In 1877 Sir Robert transformed the great hall with oak panelling and gilded leather in a faux-medieval style, for his New York wife Matilda and her guests. He also bought a new suite of furnishings, some antique and some made to look antique. Venetian windows were inserted in the 1870s. There were minor alterations in the 1830s and further additions in 1894. Together they replanted the ornamental gardens. Gertrude Jekyll visited in about 1895 and used at least three illustrations of the garden in Some English Gardens, published in 1904, where she wrote of the brilliancy of the colour masses. The summary of the same inventory says the gardens were admired by Gertrude Jekyll in the 1930s. Both sentences stand in that record. An 1824 description speaks of an excellent kitchen garden in the old style, with magnificent holly hedges, prolific fruit trees and venerable exotic shrubs, and takes that to mean that some of the yew hedges and the corkscrew topiary were probably planted from 1876 by Sir Robert.

The great hall was stripped back to bare stone in 1953. Sir James Burnett, 13th Baronet, Major-General Sir James Lauderdale Gilbert Burnett, was born on 1 April 1880 and died on 13 August 1953. He was the son of Colonel Sir Thomas Burnett, twelfth baronet, and Mary Elizabeth Cumine, and he was educated at Wellington College. He was commissioned into the Gordon Highlanders on 6 December 1899, appointed a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order in March 1915, and commanded the 1st Battalion during the First World War. On 3 December 1917 he was given command of the 186th (2/2nd West Riding) Brigade with the temporary rank of brigadier general. He was promoted colonel on 15 January 1927, with seniority from 3 June 1919, commanded the 14th Infantry Brigade from January 1927, the 153rd Infantry Brigade from January 1928, and the 8th Infantry Brigade from 25 March 1930. He was promoted major general in May 1931 and was general officer commanding the 51st (Highland) Division from June of that year until June 1935. He retired in November 1935. He was colonel of the Gordon Highlanders from 1939 to 1948. In 1913 he married Sybil Crozier Smith. They had two sons and a daughter, Rohays, who was the mother of the racehorse trainer Sir Henry Cecil. From 1926 until his death in 1953 he gardened at Crathes. Shrubs and trees were his interest. His wife, influenced by Gertrude Jekyll and by her book Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden, made the flower garden inside the walled garden. He gave the castle to the National Trust for Scotland in 1951 in his own account, in the castle account, and in the local historic-environment record. The family history dates the gift to 1952. The garden inventory says he gave the castle and part of the policies a year before he died, which, with a death on 13 August 1953, points to 1952. The family continued to live in the house after the gift. During the Second World War the Defence of Britain Project recorded that the castle was used as a hospital.

A fire on 6 January 1966 damaged parts of the castle, in particular the Queen Anne wing. Afterwards the laird, James Cecil Burnett, was limited to what is called a stump of the service wing. The quarters and possessions of the trust's representative on the site, Jean Dodds, were wholly destroyed. Schomberg Scott, the trust's resident architect, decided that the Queen Anne wing should be rebuilt to its original height of two storeys and that the Victorian wing should be wholly demolished. The insurance payment was 65,000 pounds, and half of it was used to build the Burnetts a new house detached from the castle. The garden inventory says the fire burnt down part of the eighteenth-century wing, which was rebuilt with only two storeys instead of the previous three, because the rebuilding showed that it had originally been of two storeys. Stone from the burnt wing was used in 1986 to build Strathieburn House at Durris. Schomberg Scott is Walter Schomberg Hepburn Scott, born on 14 September 1910 at Monteviot House in the Scottish Borders, near Floors Castle, where his father, James Corpatrick Hepburn Scott, was chamberlain to the eighth and ninth dukes of Roxburghe. His father was the second son of Lord Polwarth, and his mother, Isobel Alice Adelaide Kerr, was the daughter of the seventh marquess of Lothian. He was educated at Radley College and studied architecture at Edinburgh College of Art. In 1934 and 1935 he worked under Reginald Fairlie at 7 Ainslie Place. In 1935 and 1936 he toured Europe. He then worked in London for Darcy Braddell, returned in 1937 to Orphoot, Whiting and Lindsay in Edinburgh while living at Broomlands House in Kelso, and spent a short time with Edward Maufe. In the Second World War he was a captain in the Royal Engineers in India and designed a chapel in Simla. After the war he worked for the trust, first in a major way at Culzean Castle from 1946 to 1950. The trust had been formed in 1931 and had been short of money in the war. About 1950 he opened his own office in Edinburgh's West End. In 1952 he became a partner in Ian Lindsay and Partners, and he left about 1954 because the trust work dominated. That year he bought Northfield House near Prestonpans and restored it as his home. He retired in 1975 after restoring the Georgian House, 7 Charlotte Square, for the trust. He died on 11 February 1998 at the Victoria Manor Nursing Home in Edinburgh. In February 1945 he married Deborah Howard, a descendant of the Howards of Castle Howard, having proposed by telegram from Suez. His restoration list includes Mellerstain, Abbotsford, Drumlanrig, Monzie, Winton, Hamilton House in East Lothian about 1938, Lennoxlove, Stobo, Cleish, Pilmuir, Balmuto, Airlie in 1956, Falkland Palace in 1956, Elshieshields Tower in 1957, Gordon Castle in 1960, Menstrie Castle in 1961, Insch Parish Church in 1963, the Inverewe visitor centre in 1963, the Falkland visitor centre in 1963, House of Pitmuies in 1968, Pan Ha's housing in Kirkcaldy in 1968, Haddington House in 1969, Pitmedden House in 1972, and Dalkeith Palace in 1973. For Crathes his list gives a new wing after the fire and a visitor centre in 1967. He also published a book under the title Crathes Castle, along with Culzean Castle in 1975, a book on Scottish castles and houses, and Leith Hall. New buildings of his include the Simla chapel of 1944, Dupplin House from 1970 to 1976, Monteviot House from 1961 to 1963, Membland at Haddington in 1966, Gannochy Lodge at Edzell in 1973, and St Matthew's Church at Barrow-in-Furness in 1967.

The tower was added to the statutory list on 18 August 1972, and another designation record gives 17 August 1972. The category is A. The local authority and the parish are Aberdeenshire and Banchory-Ternan. The designed landscape was added to the inventory of gardens and designed landscapes on 1 July 1987. That inventory rates the artistic, historical, horticultural and architectural interest as outstanding, the scenic interest as high, the nature-conservation interest as some, and the archaeological interest as not assessed. It calls the gardens a work of art for their design and plant combinations, and it says there has been a garden since the sixteenth century, developed above all by one family and by Sybil, Lady Burnett, who was recognised by contemporaries as an important gardener and who influenced planting design in many gardens, especially in Scotland. The records read for the tower and the garden are that listing and that inventory. They do not describe a World Heritage inscription.

The first garden was probably laid out in the early seventeenth century, and Sir Thomas the first baronet is the man the inventory thinks probably made it. The designed landscape was planted in a formal style by the mid eighteenth century, and the parkland was made in the latter part of that century. Gardens near the house were renovated in the late nineteenth century and remodelled in the mid twentieth. The policies lie on the northern bank of the River Dee, in the rolling Aberdeenshire plain on the eastern edge of the Grampian foothills. One measurement places the castle about five miles, or eight kilometres, east of Banchory and about fifteen miles, or twenty-four kilometres, west of Aberdeen. The trust's directions place it fifteen miles west of Aberdeen and three miles east of Banchory, on the road from Aberdeen. The town of Banchory itself is given as about eighteen miles, or twenty-nine kilometres, west of Aberdeen, near where the Feugh meets the Dee. The policies are bordered on three sides by minor roads and on the fourth by the main road. The growing season is short, spring brings very cold easterly winds, and the annual rainfall is about 32.5 inches. The soil of the walled garden is a rich loam. From the policies the view runs south-east across the Dee to Durris Forest and a hill of 1,240 feet, or 378 metres, named Cairn-men-earn, and south towards Mongour Hill at 1,230 feet, or 375 metres. The castle sits almost in the centre. Woodland shelters it from the west, and it looks over open park to the east. The policies are almost triangular. Their extent has hardly changed since Roy's plan of about 1750, but the layout was altered at the end of the eighteenth century and had been beautified by 1864, the date of the first-edition map. In the late eighteenth century the southern park and part of the eastern park were cut from woodland that had wrapped the castle on three sides. Two long rides through the wood on Roy's plan had gone by 1864, though an avenue near the castle is probably a remnant. The inventory gives the designed landscape as 724 acres, or 293 hectares. The castle account gives the estate as 240 hectares, or 590 acres, with 210 hectares, or 530 acres, of woodland and fields, and nearly 1.5 hectares, or about 4 acres, of walled garden. The local record gives the designed landscape as 272 hectares. The three figures are not the same.

The River Dee, on whose north bank the castle stands, rises in the Cairngorms National Park, as does the Don, while the Spey rises in the Monadhliath. Cairngorms National Park, in Gaelic Pàirc Nàiseanta a' Mhonaidh Ruaidh, was established in 2003. It was the second national park set up by the Scottish Parliament, after Loch Lomond and the Trossachs in 2002. In 2010 it was extended into Perth and Kinross. It covers 4,528 square kilometres, or 1,748 square miles, in Aberdeenshire, Moray, Highland, Angus, and Perth and Kinross. About 18,000 people live in it. The largest communities named are Aviemore, Ballater, Braemar, Grantown-on-Spey, Kingussie, Newtonmore and Tomintoul. Banchory is not in that list. The park is category V in the international classification, and it contains reserves of a stricter category, including Abernethy Forest and Mar Lodge Estate. In 2018 it recorded 1.9 million tourism visits. About a quarter of visitors came from elsewhere in the United Kingdom and about 21 per cent from other countries. Tourism is said to make up about 80 per cent of the park economy. The mountains are a high plateau at about 1,000 to 1,200 metres, with summits to about 1,300 metres, tors, and long-lasting snow. The main Deeside road links the Deeside part of the park to Perth and to Aberdeen, and it is the road that passes the policies at Crathes. The castle is on that road downstream of the park, not inside the list of communities given for the park. Most of the park's rocks belong to the Dalradian Supergroup, sands, muds and limestones laid down between about 800 and 600 million years ago, deformed in the Caledonian orogeny between about 490 and 430 million years ago.

The Royal Deeside Railway is a heritage line at Milton of Crathes station, on part of the old Deeside Railway. The original line was built between 1853 and 1866 and ran from Ballater to Aberdeen Ferryhill. The royal family and other visitors to Balmoral used it. It closed in stages in 1966 and 1967, one of the lines closed under the Beeching report. A preservation society formed in 1996 to restore the stretch between Banchory and Milton of Crathes, began work in 2003, and from 2007 ran about a mile of track. The first steam-hauled passenger train ran in 2010. In 2020 a station opened at Birkenbaud lay-by, and the same year the line was in financial trouble during the pandemic. A station building from the closed Oldmeldrum railway was moved to Milton of Crathes and is the society's headquarters. Much of the track came from Guild Street yard by Aberdeen station. The service now runs about a mile from Milton of Crathes to Birkenbaud Crossing, a return of about fifteen to twenty minutes, with a single platform, a run-round loop, a shop, a museum and a ticket office. The line owns the British Rail battery multiple unit that ran on the Deeside line from 1958 to 1966. It needs an electrical overhaul and is sometimes used as a coach. Trains use the former Aberdeen Gas Works engine Bon Accord and Class 03 shunters with Mark 2 coaches in crimson and cream, and a fourth coach is being restored. A future halt called Riverside is planned, and in 2020 the society said it intended to reach Banchory station along the old trackbed, now part of the Deeside Way. The Bridge of Bennie, which carries that path, would need strengthening if trains were to cross it, and a new bridge would then be needed for the path. The railway is not the castle. Milton of Crathes is the station name beside the estate.

Inside the policies, the entrance drive winds through Milton Wood and along a narrow water made by damming the Burn of Coy, with several islands. The north end curves east and gives an illusion of greater size. The pond has silted, and weed has blurred it. In the nineteenth century the woodland strip where the drive crossed the park was narrow. A later plantation on the south side of the drive has widened it and softened the old contrast between wood and park. Until the car park, the flower-garden walls hide the castle. In the nineteenth century the drive swept south of the garden and came at the castle from the west, beside a lime avenue. Conifers along the east avenue include a Taxodium distichum, a Picea breweriana and a rare Taiwania, some planted in the 1890s and others about 1920. Woodland blocks were planted about 1700 by Sir Thomas the third baronet, and some of that planting remains in Ley Wood, including Scots pine over rock. The local record says woodland was planted about 1600 and enlarged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Milton Wood and Miller's Ward were planted in the 1790s. Many hardwoods were later felled and, soon after the Second World War, replanted with mixed conifers, including Sitka spruce, Douglas fir and Abies grandis, with a deciduous edge and rhododendron left in places. A gale in the 1950s led to further conifer planting. Near the castle and on a path to a rock outcrop about half a mile west of the garden stand a monkey puzzle over 21 metres, or 70 feet, a large deodar, a Japanese umbrella pine, and a noble fir over 35 metres, or 115 feet. In 1981 Alan Mitchell measured more than forty trees in that area and along the drives. A double lime avenue, once part of the eighteenth-century carriage drives, was probably first planted about 1702. Some trees were replaced in the eighteenth century or the early nineteenth. From 1973 the trust replanted over a long term. The avenue was felled in 1985 and 1986 and replanted in the form shown on the map of 1861.

The gardens lie east of the castle and are said to have been first laid out by Sir Thomas the third baronet. They form almost a perfect rectangle of two squares, once enclosed by hedges or walls. The upper square, the formal garden, is close to the layout on the map of 1864. A huge yew hedge splits it into two terraces joined by steps, and the lower terrace is split again by hedges. The lower square, once the vegetable garden, is enclosed by a stone wall about three metres high, and Sybil, Lady Burnett, made the present garden there. Enormous boles in the yew hedges suggest trees that could belong to the eighteenth-century layout. The trust says the massive yew hedges were planted as early as 1702, and the castle account dates ancient topiary of Irish yew to 1702, dividing the gardens into eight themed areas. The period note says the yew hedges were planted in the early eighteenth century. The local record says the majority of the yew hedges could date from the 1850s, and that a modern flower garden was created in the 1880s. The 1824 holly hedges and the suggestion of planting from 1876 sit beside those dates. The upper terrace is now in two unequal parts. The southern part is a plain grass croquet lawn, entered from the castle through a gate framed by two corkscrew yews. The upper pool garden has a square pool, clipped yew at the corners, and beds of shrubs and herbaceous plants. The lower terrace has a parterre of blue annuals around a tall fountain, with a statue said to be a copy of one in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, and a rose garden of floribunda roses edged with lavender. A large Stranvaesia davidiana once stood in the centre and, since the survey, has been replaced by three crab apples. A small rustic wooden shelter of the nineteenth century stands in the south-east corner.

The walled garden was probably built in the early eighteenth century, and the local record says it was probably built for Sir Thomas Burnet and was known for its delicate fruit. The lower square holds six separate gardens and nine kinds of border. The gardens are the Trough Garden, the Golden Garden, the Red Garden, the Wild Garden, the Camel Garden, named for two mounds of grass, and a nursery. The borders include the Aviary Border, the West Herbaceous Border, the Berberis Border, the Doocot Border, and the June and White borders. The castle account's eight themed areas and this list of six gardens are both on record. Plants include Decaisnea fargesii, Garrya fadyenii, Carpenteria californica and Hoheria lyallii, grown unusually far north. A large Eucalyptus gunnii died in the frosts of the winter of 1981 to 1982. Many herbaceous plants are short-lived and have been replaced since the trust took over, while the colour patterns continue themes set out with Lady Burnett. Glasshouses built in the 1900s by Mackenzie and Moncur were demolished in 1978, and a replica was built by Stewart, a local contractor. The glasshouse along the north wall is that early twentieth-century house as rebuilt in 1978. In the old orchard south of the walls, Sir James laid out a shrubbery with snakebark maples among other small trees. The old vegetable garden east of the drive is now a nursery. The doocot, listed in category B, was probably built in the early nineteenth century and was rebuilt on its present site in 1935, while a period note says it was rebuilt in 1937. It stands at the south-east corner of the walled garden. Stables and farm buildings lie north-east of the castle and were probably built in the early nineteenth century. There are two ice houses. The East Lodge is a picturesque cottage of the nineteenth century, like the West Lodge. East of the East Lodge, a bridge over the Burn of Coy, listed in category C, is early nineteenth century and was the road bridge before the main road was realigned. The keeper's cottage and kennels are also of the nineteenth century. Statues, fountains and a small rustic shelter of the nineteenth century stand in the gardens.

Excavation and watching briefs on the castle and its immediate grounds are separate from the Mesolithic field. In 1995, when stone flags were lifted in the room called the well room, a hard sandy mortar was found that may have been an earlier floor. No well was uncovered, though the mortar may hide one. In 1996 the ice pond and its lade were cleaned and recorded, first by evaluation and then by emptying the system. The lade is 138 metres long above the pond and 40 metres long below it. It was cut from an existing stream and lined with stone. Emptied, the pond measured 10 metres north to south by 8 metres west to east. After the pond stopped being used to make ice in the mid nineteenth century, the finds suggested it became a place of recreation for people in the castle. The whole system, upper dam, sluice, lade, pond, slide, lower dam and ice houses, survives and is described as rare in that completeness. In 1997 the removal of an old chestnut south of the castle revealed a dump of late eighteenth-century wine bottles, probably moved from somewhere else. In April and May 2000 students from Glasgow University surveyed the rose garden. Resistivity matched a photograph of 1913 showing a central feature of four arcs of bed around a trellis, and four small circular beds beyond. A blocked pistol loop of the sixteenth century was found during redecoration in the south stair tower, reported in 2002. Recording of the outside of the east and north ranges of the estate-offices courtyard in 2001 identified seven major structural phases. In 2005, during a cable trench between the castle and the courtyard stables, wall foundations of the nineteenth-century wing that burned in 1966 were uncovered, and cobbling was exposed east of the horse mill. A second brief that year, and small excavations, looked at the north and east ranges and the central and north-west parts of the courtyard behind the horse mill at the home farm. Between 2005 and 2006 a brief and a building survey covered the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century steading, including earlier recording of 2003. In February 2012 a new soakaway at the south-east corner of the stable block produced no features and no artefacts. In November 2012 a geophysical survey around the castle looked for the inner court, ranges and garden features, and found many anomalies. On the main lawn south of the castle, possible structural remains may relate to earlier pavilions or other garden buildings. On the croquet lawn a geometric pattern suggested a formal garden. In July 2013 a drainage brief around the base of the sixteenth-century tower tested a range shown on an estate map of 1798, running west from the south-west corner. A short stretch of wall and cobbling was judged too slight to be that range, and more likely a kerb to a path, perhaps linked to a west range. In 2014 excavation of anomalies from a 2013 survey found part of a previously unknown courtyard that had been the approach from the south to the sixteenth-century castle. On the west side were the remains of a stone-walled building about 6 to 7 metres long and 3.7 metres wide internally, divided into two rooms, with an original cobble floor in the north room. A matching building on the other side was thought probable. The courtyard seems to have been demolished in the later eighteenth century and the ground laid to lawn. A small number of flints came from trenches at the south end of the lawn. In October 2017 a public dig led by Daniel Rhodes opened nineteen trenches of one metre by one metre and recorded possible remains of garden pavilions and a large wall or a slump of ground. In August 2018 a service trench for the playground, and clearance of a ditch beside a ha-ha, recorded no new features or finds. The same month a public dig on the lawn in front of the castle opened twenty-four trenches of one metre by one metre and recovered artefacts from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. A desk study of the rose garden in 2019, ahead of a redesign, found it on the estate plan of 1798, divided into quadrants, with a note suggesting vegetables or fruit. A more formal layout appears on the first-edition map and had changed by the second edition. In September 2021, foundations for a new entrance in the rose garden cut only disturbed ground, with no features and no artefacts. In 2022, during telecommunication cabling, four areas of trench were watched and five features were noted, all in the first two trenches. Stone features thought to be of the nineteenth century or later belonged to the access road to the courtyard stables. Two dumps of demolition material were read as landscaping, possibly from the nineteenth-century wing destroyed by fire in 1966. Another feature may have been a rubble wall or only more demolition debris. In 2023 a watching brief ran around the south, north and west faces of the sixteenth-century tower. The summary that records it does not list a find from that brief.

Warren Field is a Mesolithic site in Aberdeenshire, near Crathes Castle, built about 8000 BCE and read as a calendar. It has twelve pits thought to match phases of the moon and to work as a lunisolar calendar, and it has been called the oldest lunisolar calendar yet found. It was first seen from the air as strange ground by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, and it was first excavated in 2004. The pits line up on the south-east horizon and on a point associated with sunrise at the midwinter solstice, which would correct a lunar count against the solar year and the seasons. The Aberdeenshire reckoner is said to predate the calendars of Mesopotamia by nearly five thousand years. It has also been read as a seasonal calendar for hunters who needed to know when migrating animals would be there. The castle account says that excavations in 2004 at the castle uncovered pits believed to date from about 10,000 years ago, analysed in 2013 and considered the world's oldest known lunar calendar, from 8000 BC to about 4000 BC, up to five thousand years older than time-measuring monuments then recorded in Mesopotamia. The field report places the pits near the castle, on the estate, not in the tower. The excavation account describes a pit alignment near a Neolithic timber hall at Warren Field. The hall, found as a cropmark, belongs to the earliest farmers in northern Britain and is dated to the first half of the fourth millennium BC. The pits are older. There are twelve certain pits and three smaller, undated postholes beside the central and largest pit, number 5. The line is not straight. It is three sections bending from south-west toward the north-east, with smaller pits at the ends and larger pits, several more than two metres across, in the middle. Pit 6 is set slightly south of the curve. The full form was likely reached by the early eighth millennium BC, in the Mesolithic, about 10,000 to 4,000 BC. Smaller features nearby, where tested, were slight and may be natural or the last traces of ploughed-out posts. About forty metres to the south-east, a line of at least five undated post-pits runs north-west to south-east. The air photograph that showed the hall and the pits was taken in 1976. From 2004 to 2006 the trust excavated the alignment with Murray Archaeological Services. A paper published on 15 July 2013, led by Vince Gaffney, argued for the luni-solar reading and for a date around 8000 BC, nearly five thousand years before formal calendars in the Near East. Shannon Fraser, archaeologist for the trust in eastern Scotland, called the monument unique in Britain so far and a glimpse of people some 10,000 years ago. Another account of the same work says the alignment is about fifty metres long, that it reached its full form around 7800 BC, almost four thousand years before Britain's first farmers, and that eight of the pits were excavated between 2004 and 2006. A perpendicular from the centre toward the Slug Road pass would frame midwinter sunrise in a notch on the horizon, the sun rising low on the eastern slope of the pass. The slight offset of pit 6 has been suggested as the place from which that sunrise was watched, and the same account says that suggestion cannot be proved. Once a year the sunrise would reset the count of lunar months. The castle wording, lunar calendar from 8000 BC to about 4000 BC, and the field wording, a monument complete in the early eighth millennium or around 7800 BC, are both in print. So are the phrases oldest lunar calendar and oldest lunisolar calendar, and the claims of nearly five thousand years before Mesopotamia and of up to five thousand years.

Balbridie is a separate Neolithic long house, on the south bank of the Dee, east of Banchory. It is one of the earliest known permanent Neolithic settlements in Scotland, dated from 3400 to 4000 BC, and it is the largest Neolithic long house excavated in Britain. Large timber houses of that kind are rare in Europe. The same dry summer of 1976 that revealed cropmarks elsewhere showed the Balbridie marks to aerial photography by the same royal commission, and later work reconstructed a huge timber building from its postholes. A later dig at Dreghorn found postholes of a large rectangular structure compared with Balbridie. In 2022 a study of nitrogen in ancient grain, by the University of Stavanger and Durham University, and published in Antiquity, argued that manure was not used there because the soil was already good. The neighbourhood also includes the Neolithic site of Bucharn, and the place lies near the Elsick Mounth, an early route inland through the lower Grampians. The timber hall described beside the pits at Warren Field and the long house at Balbridie are both early Neolithic and both in this stretch of the Dee. The pages read do not say that they are the same building.

Other monuments in Aberdeenshire appear in the same wider map and are not this castle. Yonder Bognie is a recumbent stone circle near Forgue. A recumbent circle is an early Bronze Age form in which the largest stone lies flat, its long axis generally on the ring between south and south-west. A flanker stands on each side, usually the tallest stones, and the smallest stones are on the north-east. The rest of the ring is usually six to ten uprights graded by size. Builders tended to choose a level spur with wide views. More than seventy such circles are known in lowland Aberdeenshire. The closest cousins are the axial circles of south-west Ireland. They generally enclosed a low ring cairn, often now gone, and they may derive from the Clava cairns of Inverness-shire. Cremated remains have been found at some, and the precise use is not known. Yonder Bognie is ruined. Alexander Thom suggested two circles. If there was one, it was an oval between 18 and 22 metres wide. Nine original stones remain, and three have fallen. The recumbent is 3.35 metres long and 1.70 metres high, and it appears aligned on the Foudland Hills. The western flanker stands 1.75 metres. The circle is in a private agricultural field and is a scheduled monument.

Ythan Wells, also called Glenmailen, is a Roman military camp near the farm of Glenmellan, 2.1 kilometres, or 1.3 miles, east of the village of Ythanwells. It too is a scheduled monument, and it is not the tower at Crathes. Two marching camps overlap. The larger, about 42 hectares, or 100 acres, was found in 1785 by Colonel Alex Shand. The smaller, about 13 hectares, or 32 acres, was found by J. K. St Joseph in 1968. The smaller camp is the earlier and has been dated to the campaigns of Agricola. The site is at the headwaters of the River Ythan, where springs gave drinking water to a large camp in the first centuries AD. The legions' chain of large forts is given as Ardoch, Strageath, Inchtuthil, Battledykes, Stracathro and Raedykes, then the Elsick Mounth toward Normandykes, and on to the northern camps of Deers Den and Glenmailen. The monument is valued because two camps of different size and type lie one on the other, because it is among the northernmost Roman camps in Scotland, and because part of the defence of the larger camp still stands as an earthwork, with a chance that artefacts and environmental remains survive. Antiquaries wrote the larger camp down in the eighteenth century.

Another house tied to the same family, and not this castle, is Monboddo House in the Mearns. The Barclay family held the property from the thirteenth century, when a tower was built. In 1593 the laird was James Strachan. It then passed to the Irvines and afterwards to the Burnetts of Leys. A datestone shows the arms of Irvine impaling Douglas, the initials R.E. and I.E., and the date 1635, for Robert Ervine and Ilizabeth Ervine, who rebuilt the house. The crow-stepped house stands in the Howe of Mearns near Auchenblae, about nine miles, or fourteen kilometres, from the North Sea. The old estate is given as about 200 square kilometres, or 77 square miles. In 1714 James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, was born there. He sat on the Court of Session, wrote during the Scottish Enlightenment, and is counted an early contributor to thinking about evolution. When he was appointed to the court he took the title of his father's estate. In 1773 Samuel Johnson visited. Banchory, the town to the west of the castle, has its own older finds. In 2009 a farmer east of the town found a short cist. Excavation showed a Beaker burial, radiocarbon-dated between 2330 and 2040 BC. Isotope analysis of the bones suggested a childhood on basalt geology like the local rock, or on chalk, so the person could have been local or could have come from somewhere such as Yorkshire. Residue in the Beaker pot was butter or milk. The town's name is linked to an early Christian settlement of St Ternan, said to have been a follower of St Ninian, on the banks of the Dee at what became the kirkyard of the medieval parish of Banchory-Ternan. That parish is the parish of the castle.

The trust's account of a visit today says the Burnett family lived in the castle for over 350 years, with roots in 1323, and that Alexander Burnett built the castle in the sixteenth century. It points visitors to the horn, to family portraits, to antique furniture, to the walled garden in eight sections, and to the yew hedges planted as early as 1702. Six waymarked trails cross the estate, with roe deer, red squirrels, woodpeckers, buzzards and herons named among the wildlife. The same account calls the place a turreted tower house of painted ceilings and oak panels. Those are the rooms and the garden already dated above. The conflicts of year, of who finished the tower, of how old the yews are, of how large the designed landscape is, and of when the family gave the house away, remain the substance of the record rather than a single smoothed story.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/crathes-castle