# Drum Castle

castle in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, UK

Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom

Fortification

## Story

• Drum Castle, near Drumoak in Aberdeenshire, is a medieval tower with a Jacobean house and later wings, and it was the seat of the chief of Clan Irvine.
• The tower is dated about 1280 to 1300, to 1286, to before 1324, and also to the years just after 1323, and Robert the Bruce gave the royal forest to William de Irwyn in 1323.
• The Irvines held Drum through feud, civil war and the Jacobite risings, and the house passed into charitable care in 1975 or in 1976, after more than six centuries.
• A wing of 1619, a library of about 4,000 books made in the lower hall around 1840, and courtyard work of 1875 by David Bryce and John Bryce stand against the old tower.
• Digging has found a medieval cesspit, traces of a seventeenth-century garden, and, on 7 May 2024, no finds in a cable trench east of the castle.

## Visiting

Entry to the castle is by guided tour, and last entry is at 3.15pm. The castle, shop, tearoom and walled garden are open from 10.30 to 16.00 on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from 2 November to 28 March 2027, and the garden opening depends on the weather. The grounds are open daily from dawn to dusk. 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.
Admission with a donation is £19.80 for an adult, £15.40 for a concession, £44.55 for a family, and £37.95 for a one-adult family. Admission to the walled garden only is £5 for an adult. A car park ticket is £5, the car park ticket is free for members, and admission is free for members. Visitors are not allowed to enter the tower until further notice, while structural repairs continue.
Dogs are allowed to enter the grounds on a lead in the car park, near the play areas, in the courtyard and around the castle, and dogs are not allowed in the walled garden. Wheelchair users are allowed to enter the ground floor, including the shop and tearoom, with limited access to the main floor. Drone flying is not allowed without prior permission.

## History

Drum Castle stands near Drumoak in Aberdeenshire, on a ridge to the north of the River Dee. Its name is the Scottish Gaelic word druim, a ridge, and the range beyond the valley is the Grampian Mountains, called Am Monadh in that language. Two old roads, the Elsick Mounth and the Causey Mounth, cross those hills, and the ford where the Elsick Mounth meets the Dee is thought to explain why a tower was set here to watch the traffic.

The tower is called one of the three oldest in Scotland, and it is dated about 1280 to 1300, to 1286, and to a time before 1324. A survey of 2010, with further research in January 2011, read nine phases and placed the first work shortly after 1323, taking four years. Richard Cementarius, King’s Master Mason to Alexander III and the first Provost of Aberdeen in 1272, is believed to have designed it. He is also named as architect of the Brig o’ Balgownie in Old Aberdeen, though that bridge is also called a fourteenth-century structure.

In 1323 Robert the Bruce granted the royal forest and the tower to William de Irwyn. He is remembered as the king’s armour bearer and secretary, as the second son of Irving of Bonshaw, and as the eldest son of a house claimed both at Bonshaw and at Woodhouse Tower. The grant is also set ten years after Bannockburn, in 1324, and the story gives him three holly leaves and the motto Sub sole sub umbra virens, while the crest of Clan Irvine is also a sheaf of nine. William is said to have died in 1332, and his son Thomas succeeded him, followed by twelve lairds named Alexander.

Clan Irvine feuded with Clan Keith from a fight at Drumoak in 1402 until a peace on the banks of the Dee in 2002. At Harlaw in 1411 the third laird, Alexander Irvine, is said to have died in single combat with Hector Maclean, yet a marriage contract of 11 October 1411 still joins Elizabeth Keith to an Alexander Irvine of Drum. Later lairds helped ransom James I, held Aberdeen after that king was murdered in Perth, and lost a son at Pinkie Cleugh in 1547.

In August 1564 Mary, Queen of Scots, sent to the Laird of Drum for provisions while she travelled near Aberdeen, and she may have visited. The chapel, west of the tower, grew from an older church and is given both as a building of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and as walls at least of the fifteenth.

Restoration of the chapel is dated 1856 and 1857, in memory of a six-year-old Alexander Forbes Irvine who died in 1856, with the roof, the enlarged west window and the cross belonging to 1857, and with further work through 1864, 1867, 1876 and a font of 1882. An altar slab said to have come from the parish kirk at Drumoak has been in the chapel since John Logan drew it in 1820. A canopy for Sir Alexander Irvine, fourth of Drum, and Elizabeth Keith was taken from St Nicholas Kirk after the fire of 1874 and later set on the south wall. A list of the building instead names a tomb recess of a Sir Alexander Irvine who died in 1911, set up again in 1951.

The figure of the Virgin installed in 1897 is called a brass from Ausberg and a silver Madonna from Augsburg. The ninth laird’s Jacobean wing is dated 1619, while the roof timbers of the cross chamber were felled between 1603 and 1612. In June 1636 Sir Alexander Irvine of Drum and Magdalene Scrimgeour were censured, with Sir James Grant of Freuchie, for harbouring Gilderoy, Patrick McGregor, who was hanged at Edinburgh that summer on a gibbet higher than those of the men tried with him.

In the Civil War the royalist castle is said to have been attacked twice, and also sacked three times. Lady Irvine surrendered it to a force with artillery, Robert Irvine died in the dungeons of Edinburgh Castle, and his brother Alexander was freed after James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose, won at Kilsyth in 1645. Troops of the Earl of Argyll are said to have ruined the garden planting about 1640. The fourteenth laird was wounded at Sheriffmuir in 1715, and in 1746, after Culloden, the laird hid in a secret room and then lived in exile in France.

The eighteenth laird, from 1775, spent heavily on the garden and the house, and work of 1790 to 1792 is said to have removed what remained of the old house. Alexander Forbes Irvine, twentieth laird, was born in 1818, inherited in 1861, rose to be Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, and died at Drum on 4 April 1892. In 1875 and 1876 he restored the courtyard. David Bryce began the new entrance and angle tower, and after Bryce’s death his nephew John Bryce finished the design.

The lower hall was made into a library of about 4,000 books around 1840, and a drawing shows that room by 1848. Irvine ownership ended in 1975 by the will of Quentin Forbes Irvine, called the twenty-fifth laird, or in 1976 under an agreement made in 1964 by H. Q. Forbes Irvine, called the twenty-fourth, after more than 650 years.

The chief named in the present generation is Alexander Irvine of Drum, twenty-seventh Baron of Drum.

The tower measures about 53 feet by 40 feet and 70 feet high, with a well in the cellar and halls once split by timber floors. Excavation in the laird’s hall found the base of a screen. In May 2014 a stone-lined cesspit in the courtyard was opened, taking waste from the tower’s garderobes, and animal bone and medieval pottery lay in its upper fill. Trenches on the south lawn in 2008 found walls, a path, paving, redeposited prehistoric flints and medieval sherds, read as a formal garden of about 1619.

A watching brief on 7 May 2024, on a cable trench east of the castle, found only modern drains and no archaeological features. The Old Wood of Drum is an oak wood known in the sixteenth century, the source of timber for a ship launched in 1609, and also described as oaks dating from the eighteenth century. The walled garden, paid for in 1796 and derelict in 1987, was remade from 1991 as quadrants of historic roses, counted either from the seventeenth century to the twentieth or from the sixteenth.

The chapel and the castle were listed on 16 April 1971, the castle in category A and the chapel in category B, and the designed landscape was designated on 1 July 1987. In 2019 the castle received 47,446 visits, and the tower is closed to visitors while the wall-walk is repaired against the rain.

## Photographs

- [Drum Castle; Aberdeenshire, Scotland — Ikiwaner](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Drum_Castle.jpg)
- [Drum Castle. This is Drum Castle, with the granite tower of 1272 on the right and the mansion of 1619 on the left. — Craig Burgess](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_14072.jpg)
- [Belskavie tower Coalford This was a lookout tower for nearby Drum Castle, there are nice views toward Peterculter and Aberdeen and the hills of Deeside. — Alan Findlay](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Belskavie_tower_Coalford_-_geograph.org.uk_-_355952.jpg)
- [Autumn at Drum Castle — Alan Findlay](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Autumn_at_Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_617518.jpg)
- [Autumn leaves at Drum Castle — Alan Findlay](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Autumn_leaves_at_Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_617513.jpg)
- [Drum Castle — Dan](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1083907.jpg)
- [A yett at Drum Castle A wrought iron secure doorway (Scottish portcullis) for the main entrance to Drum Castle. — Stanley Howe](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/A_yett_at_Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1318464.jpg)
- [Archway exit from Drum Castle courtyard With two stone cheese-presses by the wall to its left. — Stanley Howe](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Archway_exit_from_Drum_Castle_courtyard_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1318488.jpg)
- [Drum Castle Drum Castle was the seat of the Irvine Clan for centuries. The oldest part - the unaltered keep - dates from the 13th century. — Astrid Horn](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1574266.jpg)
- [Drum Castle — John Preston Neale](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Neale%281824%29_p1.232_-_Drum%2C_Aberdeenshire.jpg)

## Sources

- [Drum Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Clan Irvine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Irvine) — Wikipedia
- [Richard Cementarius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cementarius) — Wikipedia
- [Alexander Forbes Irvine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Forbes_Irvine) — Wikipedia
- [Old Aberdeen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Aberdeen) — Wikipedia
- [Scottish Gaelic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic) — Wikipedia
- [Causey Mounth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causey_Mounth) — Wikipedia
- [Elsick Mounth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsick_Mounth) — Wikipedia
- [Grampian Mountains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grampian_Mountains) — Wikipedia
- [Gilderoy (outlaw)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilderoy_(outlaw)) — Wikipedia
- [Drum Castle, Garden and Estate](https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/drum-castle) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Planning your visit to Drum Castle](https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/drum-castle/planning-your-visit) — National Trust for Scotland
- [A Tale of Two Tower Houses: Drum Castle](https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/a-tale-of-two-tower-houses-drum-castle) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Why we love Drum Castle, Garden and Estate](https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/why-we-love-drum-castle-garden-estate) — National Trust for Scotland
- [Drum Castle](https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/LB3113) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Drum Castle designed landscape](https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/GDL00141) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Drum Castle, Chapel](https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/LB3114) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Drum Castle](https://her.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/Monument/MAB18004/) — Aberdeenshire Historic Environment Record
- [14th-Century Sanitation Examined at Scotland’s Drum Castle](https://archaeology.org/news/2014/06/12/140612-scotland-drum-castle/) — Archaeology Magazine
- [The Tower and House of Drum, Aberdeenshire](https://doi.org/10.9750/psas.115.297.356) — Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
- [Watching brief at Drum Castle, Drumoak](https://doi.org/10.5284/1131730) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Drum Castle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drum_Castle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Drum Castle - geograph.org.uk - 14072.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_14072.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Belskavie tower Coalford - geograph.org.uk - 355952.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Belskavie_tower_Coalford_-_geograph.org.uk_-_355952.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Autumn at Drum Castle - geograph.org.uk - 617518.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Autumn_at_Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_617518.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Autumn leaves at Drum Castle - geograph.org.uk - 617513.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Autumn_leaves_at_Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_617513.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Drum Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1083907.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1083907.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [A yett at Drum Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1318464.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_yett_at_Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1318464.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Archway exit from Drum Castle courtyard - geograph.org.uk - 1318488.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Archway_exit_from_Drum_Castle_courtyard_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1318488.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Drum Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1574266.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drum_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1574266.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Neale(1824) p1.232 - Drum, Aberdeenshire.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neale(1824)_p1.232_-_Drum,_Aberdeenshire.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Drum Castle stands near Drumoak in Aberdeenshire, on a ridge to the north of the valley of the River Dee. The name Drum comes from Scottish Gaelic druim, a ridge. Scottish Gaelic, called Gàidhlig by its speakers, is a Celtic language of the Gaels of Scotland. It grew, with Irish and Manx, out of Old Irish, and it became a distinct spoken language sometime in the thirteenth century, in the Middle Irish period, although the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland kept a common literary language well into the seventeenth century. Most of modern Scotland was once Gaelic-speaking, and the place-names still show it. The Grampian Mountains are Am Monadh in Scottish Gaelic. They are one of the three great ranges of Scotland, with the Northwest Highlands and the Southern Uplands, and together those ranges take up about half the country. The Grampian range runs from northeast to southwest between the Highland Boundary Fault and the Great Glen. It holds Ben Nevis, whose peak is the highest point in the British Isles at 1,345 metres or 4,413 feet, and Ben Macdui at 1,309 metres or 4,295 feet. The Dee is among the rivers that rise in the Grampians, with the Tay, the Spey, the Don and the Esk. Until the nineteenth century the hills were often treated as more than one range inside the wider Highlands, and they still have no single name in Scottish Gaelic or in the Doric of the Lowlands.

The Roman historian Tacitus recorded Mons Graupius as the place where Gnaeus Julius Agricola defeated the Caledonians about 83 AD. Where that hill stood is disputed. Most readings put it inside the Grampian massif, and Raedykes, Megray Hill and Kempstone Hill have all been suggested. The spelling Graupius comes from a medieval copy. A printed edition of 1476 turned it into Grampius, and in 1520 the Scottish historian Hector Boece is believed to have applied the name Grampians to the range, so the mountains may owe their usual name to a typesetter’s mistake. In the Middle Ages this ground was the Mounth, and that name remains on several routes. Writing about Deeside, Fenton Wyness put the northern edge of the Grampians at the River Dee, beginning in a low range on the seacoast immediately south of Aberdeen and rising westward through Cairn-mon-earn, Kerloch, Mount Battock, Mount Keen, Lochnagar and on toward Beinn Dearg. Drum Castle sits on the north side of that valley. The Hill of Fare, 1,320 feet or 433 metres, lies to the west, and its foothills form the setting. The designed landscape is given as some 393 acres, or 159 hectares. From the top of the tower the view is described as a wide panorama, while the roads outside catch only glimpses.

The distance from the castle is not given in one set of figures. It is placed about 2 miles, or 3 kilometres, west of Peterculter, and also 3 miles, or 5 kilometres, west of Peterculter. It is placed about 6½ miles, or 10.5 kilometres, northeast of Banchory, and also 8 miles east of Banchory. It is placed 10 miles west of Aberdeen, and the same distance is also given as 10 miles or 16 kilometres. It is called the nearest of the great houses of the county to the city.

Two old routes cross the Grampian Mountains near this ground, and both are part of the reason the tower is thought to stand where it does. The Elsick Mounth is an ancient trackway in the vicinity of Netherley. It was one of the few ways over the Grampian Mounth in prehistoric and medieval times. Its highest pass lies in the Durris Forest. Roman legions marched from Raedykes to the camp at Normandykes, now just south of Peterculter, seeking higher ground so as to avoid the bogs of Red Moss and the other low mosses of the Burn of Muchalls. That march used the Elsick Mounth, west of Netherley. North of Normandykes the same march is carried on to the next camp at Ythan Wells. The ending of the Elsick Mounth at a ford of the River Dee is thought to have been instrumental in the siting of Drum Castle, as a point from which traffic on that track could be watched. Maryculter House, Lairhillock Inn and Muchalls Castle lie in the same vicinity. Most of the land the track crosses is now inside the Durris Forest, managed as conifer with extensive clearfelling, though in ancient times that forest would have been mixed deciduous woodland.

The Causey Mounth is a different road, an ancient drovers’ road over the coastal fringe of the Grampian Mountains. It was developed around the twelfth century as the main highway between Stonehaven and Aberdeen, and it remained the principal route between those places until the middle of the twentieth century. It was built as a raised rock causeway across bog, including the Portlethen Moss. Some paved lengths can still be walked. Other lengths are footpaths, and some have vanished into fields. Prehistoric stones, among them the Old Bourtreebush stone circle, lie along it. In the early Middle Ages the Mounth, the eastern end of the Grampian Mountains, was a hard barrier between the northeast and the Lowlands, and that barrier, with the bogs, may have pushed a Roman coastal march inland. The farthest known major coastal Roman camp in the east of Scotland, Raedykes, lies exactly at the southern end of the Causey Mounth. From Stonehaven the road is tied to Dunnottar Castle and to Cowie Castle, then north across the Burn of Muchalls at the Bridge of Muchalls, past Muchalls Castle, past the ruins of Episcopal chapels of 1624 on that estate, and on by Saint Ternan’s Church. It crosses the Burn of Pheppie and a bridge over the Burn of Elsick at Gillybrands, a little southeast of Elsick House, then the Portlethen Moss.

The tower itself is dated in several ways, and the dates do not collapse into one building campaign. It is called a thirteenth-century tower, one of the three oldest tower houses in Scotland, and notably unaltered. It is given as about 1280 to 1300. It is thought to have been built in 1286. It is believed to have been in existence before 1324. A royal hunting lodge is said to have stood at Drum before the end of the thirteenth century, and the later castle grew from that lodge. A building survey of 2010, with further research in January 2011, read nine phases of development and placed the earliest construction of the Drum Tower shortly after 1323, the work taking four years. In the 1320s the tower is also described as the principal building on the site, later left almost as a pile of masonry closing one side of a courtyard. A period note simply puts 1280 beside the gift of 1323.

Richard Cementarius, also called Richard the Mason, is the architect proposed for that old tower. He was a thirteenth-century Scottish architect, King’s Master Mason to King Alexander III of Scotland, and he became the first Provost of Aberdeen in 1272. He is believed to have designed the old tower of Drum Castle. He is known as the architect of the Brig o’ Balgownie, the first Bridge of Don, in Old Aberdeen. Both works are said to contain the pointed arches taken as characteristic of him. The inventory of the designed landscape thinks the original Tower of Drum was built in 1286 by Richard Cementarius, who became the first Provost. His own life gives the provostship in 1272 and the design of the tower as a belief, not a documented contract. The bridge he is credited with is also called a fourteenth-century bridge, now used on foot, and a contender for the oldest surviving bridge in Scotland. Those two ages for the Brig o’ Balgownie sit side by side with the claim that he built it.

Old Aberdeen, where that bridge stands, was once a burgh apart from the more commercial town beside it. It was erected a burgh of barony on 26 December 1489 and was joined to Aberdeen by the Aberdeen Corporation Act 1891. Its motto is concordia res parvae crescunt, through harmony small things increase. It was an important political, ecclesiastical and cultural centre from the Late Middle Ages. St Machar’s Cathedral and its medieval buildings formed the original place, before the university arrived in 1495. King’s College Chapel, of the late fifteenth century, is one of two surviving Scottish medieval churches with an open crown spire. The old town is now the main campus of the University of Aberdeen, inside the Aberdeen City council area, and it remains a community council area. In the 1630s the Covenanters challenged the Doctors of Aberdeen by meeting at Muchalls Castle and answering letters the doctors had issued. That meeting is said to have set the stage for the first battle of the Bishops’ Wars, when William Keith, 7th Earl Marischal, and the Marquess of Montrose led a Covenanter army of 9,000 men over the Causey Mounth to attack forces at the Bridge of Dee and, in that account, gained control of Old Aberdeen. The Causey Mounth account places the same commanders and the same army of 9,000 on the road in 1639, in the first battle of the Civil War. Drum Castle is not named as the target of that march. The castle is said, separately, to have played a role in the Covenanting Rebellion, as did nearby Muchalls Castle, and to have been attacked and sacked three times.

The Royal Forest and Tower of Drum were given to William de Irwyn in 1323 by Robert the Bruce. He is called armour bearer and secretary to the king, and a neighbour of the king. He is also called the king’s secretary, William de Irwin of Woodhouse. Clan Irvine calls him the second son of Irving of Bonshaw, taken into royal service, and rewarded after twenty years with the royal forest of Drum in Aberdeenshire, which became the seat of the chief. A crest story says that Bruce, a fugitive from the court of Edward I, was concealed by Irving of Bonshaw on many occasions, and that the second son, William de Irwyn, followed him, was with him when he was routed at Methven, shared the later dangers, and was one of seven hidden with him in a copse of holly while pursuers passed. When Bruce came into his own he made William Master of the Rolls and, ten years after the Battle of Bannockburn, gave him the forest of Drum near Aberdeen in free barony. He also allowed the holly badge of three leaves and the motto Sub sole sub umbra virens, flourishing both in sunshine and in shade, which that story says are still the arms of the Irving family. An alternative rendering of the motto is given as green shadow beneath the sun. The crest of Clan Irvine is also blazoned as a sheaf of holly of nine leaves, vert, slipped and banded gules. Ten years after Bannockburn falls in 1324, while the grant is otherwise dated 1323.

A study of the tower and house places the family at the end of the thirteenth century in Ayrshire, in the district around Irvine, holding lands from the Bruces, lords of Annandale. It takes the founder of the Aberdeen branch to be the son of William de Irewine of Bonshaw, or at least of the branch settled at Bonshaw. Tradition divides. In Dumfriesshire, William’s home is Woodhouse Tower. In Aberdeenshire, Bonshaw has always been claimed. From one of those houses, that study says, William de Irewine’s eldest son, also William, followed Robert Bruce in 1306. The clan account’s second son and this study’s eldest son are not the same claim, and Woodhouse and Bonshaw are not the same claim. William is said to have died in 1332 and to have been succeeded by his son Thomas. The twelve lairds after Thomas are all named Alexander Irwin, the surname later adapted to Irvine. The clan account says the third laird, Alexander Irvine, was the first of a line of twelve Irvines who successively bore the name Alexander. There was already a tower, in the clan account, built before the end of the thirteenth century as a royal hunting lodge, and from it grew Drum Castle, seat of the chief.

Clan Irvine was often at feud with the neighbouring Clan Keith. Each invaded the other’s lands. In 1402 Clan Irvine is said to have slaughtered an invading war party of Clan Keith at the Battle of Drumoak. The feud is also called one of the most enduring of the early years of the old tower. It ran, in the clan’s later reckoning, from 1402 to 2002. In 2002 the previous chief of Clan Irvine and the 13th Earl of Kintore, previous chief of Clan Keith, made a peace on the banks of the River Dee, ending what was called a feud of 600 years. The chief named for that peace, David Irvine of Drum, was born on 20 January 1939 in Birkenhead and died on 9 February 2019 in Aberdeen, aged 80. The chief given after him is Alexander Irvine of Drum, 27th Baron of Drum. The clan’s seat remains Drum Castle. Allied with Clan Bruce, it counts Clan Keith and Clan Maclean among its rivals. The region given for the clan is Aberdeenshire.

The third laird, Alexander Irvine, is said to have been a knight of legendary prowess. He followed the Earl of Mar to the wars in France and later fought at the Battle of Harlaw in 1411, only twenty miles from Drum. There he met Hector Maclean of the Battles, chief of Clan Maclean, in single combat, and both are said to have died of the wounds they gave each other. A ballad of the battle calls him Gude Sir Alexander Irvine, the much renounit Laird of Drum. The succession after Harlaw is not told as a single fact. A marriage contract between Elizabeth Keith and Alexander Irvine of Drum is dated 11 October 1411, three months after the battle, and both names appear on the Drum brass in St Nicholas Kirk in Aberdeen. Earlier histories and genealogies treat the fourth Sir Alexander as the renamed brother of the third laird. Later writers tend to think the fourth laird was a son of the third. Others confuse the two. On one balance it was a son of the third laird who succeeded and who married Elizabeth Keith. That contract sits beside the account in which the third laird died of his wounds at Harlaw. The question of which son, if it was a son, is left open, and a tradition that a marriage to Elizabeth Keith was never consummated, and that another Irvine then married her, is recorded as having almost certainly some basis, without settling the names.

The next laird of Drum was a prominent figure in the negotiations to ransom James I of Scotland from the English. When the king was released, de Irwyne was knighted. When the king was murdered in Perth, Sir Alexander Irvine took control of the city of Aberdeen to restore order. The sixth laird, chief of Clan Irvine, was a peacemaker, and in 1527 King James V of Scotland rewarded him for suppressing rebels, thieves, reivers, sorcerers and murderers. During the Anglo-Scottish wars the sixth laird’s son was killed when the clan fought the English at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh in 1547.

In August 1564, when Mary, Queen of Scots, was travelling near Aberdeen, she sent a messenger to the Laird of Drum asking him to make provisions for her, and she may have visited the castle. That is as far as the visit is taken. It is not recorded as a stay of a stated number of days.

An older church on the site was modified to create the chapel in the 1500s and 1600s. The chapel is also described as built in the 1500s, as of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as early, and said once to have been larger. In its present form it is a small rubble-built crowstepped rectangle, orientated west, with grotesque heads at the east end. A measured account puts it west of the castle at some 37 feet by 21 feet, or 11.3 metres by 6.4 metres, and dates the rubble walls at least to the fifteenth century. The only other features that may be that old are two weathered heads built into the west wall, and the north doorway, with plainly chamfered jambs and head. It is said to have gone out of use as a chapel possibly during the Civil War, without becoming a ruin, and to have remained the family’s burial place. That survival is called unusual, because a chapel that had ceased to be used for worship was often left a ruin even when it still held a family vault. The episcopal leanings of the Irvines are offered as a reason it may have kept occasional services. The earliest marked slab inside is that of Alexander Irvine, the seventeenth laird, buried there in 1761. Sixteen years later his son spent £1 7s 4d on five new oaken frames for the windows. Those would have been the three square windows in the south wall and the windows in the east and west gables, later enlarged. The three old windows were each protected by three vertical bars. The bars have gone. The sockets remain. The chapel was slated in 1786, probably to make the building sound, since Alexander’s wife, Jean Forbes of Schivas, was buried that year.

The chapel was surveyed on 10 October 1856, the sheet signed AIF, possibly for Anna Forbes Irvine, and a caption also dates a survey of the chapel to 1857 under the same initials. Restoration started in 1857, before the twentieth laird succeeded, in memory of their eldest son, who had died the previous year. The child is named Alexander Forbes Irvine, the six-year-old grandson of the nineteenth laird, who died in 1856. That first restoration provided a new roof, enlarged the west window, and added the cross and a bellcote. It is also said to have been completed in 1867. The designation record says the chapel was re-roofed in 1857, the west window enlarged and the cross added, and a separate note says the chapel was restored in 1856. In 1864 the twentieth laird and his wife carried the work on: the walls were picked clean to expose the rubble, a new floor was laid, an altar was installed, and the west window was filled with stained glass of the Crucifixion by Hardman of Birmingham. The designation record puts masonry repairs, the altar and the credence in 1864, spelling the altar as alter. Stained glass was added to the east window in 1876. A font was provided in 1882.

Two objects in the chapel came from elsewhere, and the accounts of the tomb do not agree. An altar slab, or mensa, is a sandstone block 7 feet 10 inches by 2 feet 8 inches and 8½ inches thick, with five incised consecration crosses, the centre one larger, all of them larger than is customary, and all joined by incised diagonal lines. The four edges are moulded with a quirk and roll. It is said to have stood formerly in the old parish kirk at Drumoak. It has certainly been in the chapel since 1820, when John Logan drew it. Its size and moulded edges make it unlikely that it was meant for either that kirk or this chapel. It seems intended for a freestanding altar in a large church. James Cruickshank felt the design of the slab was not inconsistent with an early date. The last laird had the slab cleaned and put back to use. The great tomb canopy on the south side originally sheltered the effigies of Sir Alexander Irvine, fourth of Drum, and Elizabeth Keith his wife, and stood in the Drum Aisle of St Nicholas Kirk. In the restoration of that church in 1875, after the great fire of 1874, the canopy was taken down and the stones left in the kirkyard. Anna Forbes Irvine rescued them and re-erected them in the house. The heavily moulded segmental arch, with elaborate cresting and Sir Alexander’s arms, helm and crest, is called as fine a piece of fifteenth-century tomb design as any in Scotland. The last laird set the canopy against the south wall of the chapel. Both the altar and the canopy are too large for the room. The designation record, by contrast, describes a segmentally arched tomb recess of Sir Alexander Irvine, who died in 1911, brought from Drum’s Aisle at St Nicholas in Aberdeen and re-erected at the chapel in 1951. The two identifications, a fifteenth-century canopy of the fourth laird and Elizabeth Keith, and a recess of a Sir Alexander Irvine who died in 1911, are both on record. They are not reconciled here.

A brass figure of the Blessed Virgin, German, said to have come from Ausberg, was installed in 1897. The same figure is also called an Augsburg silver Madonna, and a great silver statue of the Virgin brought from Augsburg in 1897. Brass and silver, Ausberg and Augsburg, are the variants. The chapel is a private ecclesiastical building still in use as such. It was added to the lists on 16 April 1971 in category B, the same day the castle itself was added in category A. One account has also said that the castle has been a category A listed property since 1987. The designed landscape was designated on 1 July 1987, and that record was revised in 2026 for minor corrections only. The chapel may be hired, with the dining hall and the estate, for weddings and corporate functions.

The ninth laird added a large wing in 1619. It is called a Jacobean mansion at the southwest corner of the tower, and a Jacobean south range. By then the family are called the largest landowners in Aberdeen, Kincardine and Angus. The mansion is of two storeys and a basement, the east part of three storeys and a basement. The main front faces south, with square angle towers, harling, and sculptured dormer heads. A centre doorpiece with an architrave, steps to the main floor, and enlarged windows on that floor are placed about 1800. A courtyard lies to the west of the tower, with a brewhouse at the northeast and an original gateway in the west wall. The brewhouse is also called a sixteenth-century building, and the entrance building on the north side of the tower, of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, is said to have been reused later for service, including brewing. A one-storey range on the south side of the tower is dated to the middle of the fourteenth century or the fifteenth. The Jacobean addition is said to have brought down the earlier hall range and to have included a cross range.

Timbers complicate the year 1619. Dendrochronology of the cross-chamber roof, reported in 2012, dates the felling of those timbers to the years between 1603 and 1612, and also gives felling dates of 1603 and 1612. The dates are compared with the mansion house, and the timber of both is taken to have come from the same woodland. A timber stair from the northeast corner of the hall was dated to the first half of the fifteenth century, and the same steps are also given a felling date in the first four decades of the fifteenth century, with a later refurbishment at an unknown date. In 1999 part of the upper floor of the laird’s hall was reconstructed, and a new stair was put into the northeast corner, close to where the original stair had stood.

In June 1636 Sir Alexander Irvine of Drum and his wife Magdalene Scrimgeour were censured for harbouring the outlaw Gilderoy. The same censure names Sir James Grant of Freuchie with them. Gilderoy was Patrick McGregor, in Scottish Gaelic Pàdraig MacGriogair, who died in 1636 in Edinburgh. His nickname, Gille Ruadh, means the red-haired lad. He is also called Gilroy, Gilder Roy and Gilleroy. He is described as an outlaw and a mass murderer who raided cattle and practised blackmail and extortion in Strathspey, Braemar, Cromarty and other districts near Aberdeen in the Stuart period. He led a band of limmers, robbers. He is sometimes set beside Robin Hood, and he is sometimes confused with Rob Roy MacGregor, who lived later, from 1671 to 1734. A rock hollow at the Burn o’ Vat, near Ballater on Deeside, is popularly given to Rob Roy, but tradition says Gilderoy used it, and a shallow depression behind the waterfall is called Gilderoy’s Cave, where he is said once to have hidden when the burn was in spate. That cave is not a room of Drum Castle.

His trial is dated from 7 June 1636 in Edinburgh, before Archibald, Lord Lorne, heritable justiciar of the South and North Isles and the sheriffdom of Argyll, who had taken the man called the arch rebel. The associates named with Patrick McGregor were John Forbes, Alistair Forbes, Callum Forbes, George Grant, John McColme, John McGregor McEane, Gillespie McFarlane, Alistair McInneir, and Ewin McGregor, alias Accawisch. The charges include a night attack on the house of Alexander Hay at Caimecowlie, the couple taken captive and carried two miles, held two hours, and freed only against a promise of ransom, with the goods of the house stolen. Tenants of Sir Robert Innes of Balvenie were robbed of food and drink. In 1635 four hens were stolen from the householder of Culquharnie. William Dougat of Auchihove and some of his men were taken and a ransom of two hundred merks demanded. Murders, called cruel slaughters, are among the charges. He was found guilty. The doom was that on Friday 29 July he was to be drawn backward on a cart from the tolbooth to the market cross of Edinburgh, and hanged until dead on a gibbet higher than that of his associates. With John Forbes he was to have his head and right hand struck off. Gilderoy’s head and right hand were to be fixed on the Netherbow port of Edinburgh, and those of John Forbes on the west port. His band is said to have gone on ravaging after the execution. Popular lives move his death as late as April 1658, give him the age of thirty-four, and add episodes, among them a theft from Cardinal Richelieu and a fight with Oliver Cromwell, which the trial record does not contain. The phrase to be hung higher than Gilderoy’s kite came to mean a punishment worse than the ordinary doom of even a despised criminal. A ballad, softened after the execution, remembered him as a bonnie boy. Those songs are not the trial.

The royalist Irvines supported Charles I during the Civil War. They lived in a mainly Covenanter district, and Drum Castle was an obvious target. One summary says the castle was attacked twice. Another says it was attacked and sacked three times in the Covenanting Rebellion. In the fuller Civil War account the castle was attacked while the laird was absent, by a strong force that surrounded it with artillery. Lady Irvine surrendered, and the castle was looted. The laird’s two sons both fought and both were captured. The younger, Robert, died in the dungeons of Edinburgh Castle. His brother Alexander was freed after the victory of James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose, at the Battle of Kilsyth in 1645. The castle was attacked again, ransacked, the ladies of the house were ejected, and the estate was ruined. A further account says the Earl of Argyll’s troops plundered Drum, and the seventeenth-century historian John Spalding wrote that they destroyed the pleasant garden planting which existed then. The date of that destruction is given as about 1640. Where the planting stood, and what form it took, is uncertain. Loyalty to Charles I and to the Stuart cause is said to have ended the family’s prosperity. Their support in the risings of 1715 and 1745 is said to have brought the forfeiture of parts of the estate.

In the Jacobite rising of 1715 the fourteenth laird supported the Jacobite cause and fought at the Battle of Sheriffmuir, where he took a severe head wound. He never recovered. After years of illness he died leaving no direct heir. The estate passed to his uncle, John Irvine, and then to another kinsman, John Irvine of Crimond. In the rising of 1745 Clan Irvine again supported the Stuarts and fought at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The laird of Drum escaped capture by hiding in a secret room in the castle. He then lived for a few years in exile in France until he was allowed to return to his estates.

Little was done to the designed landscape until the later eighteenth century. The existing structure of that landscape was established at the end of the eighteenth century and took in the older church and the Old Forest of Drum. It was altered again around 1850 and in 1875. The eighteenth laird subscribed to the Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. Records from his succession in 1775 until about 1796 suggest a great deal of work in the garden, and the house was altered in the same years. Between 1790 and 1792, work costing £484 was more expensive than the previous fourteen years and is said to have destroyed all the remaining traces of the old house. That Alexander Irvine wanted a symmetrical house, an entrance at the level of the public rooms, rooms convenient for entertaining, and an easy stair rather than a newel. The listing places the new doorpiece and the enlarged main-floor windows at about 1800. In 1780 the house had been insured for a premium of 12 shillings. In April 1784 the premium had risen to one guinea, and in 1785 the window tax was assessed at £4 19s 2d. In 1786, work to the value of £50 included repairs to the tower, a new ash house, and the slating of the chapel. No structural payments are recorded for 1784 or 1785.

Alexander Forbes Irvine, twentieth laird of Drum, was born on 18 February 1818 at Schivas House near Tarves in Aberdeenshire, and he died at Drum Castle on 4 April 1892. He was the son of Margaret Hamilton, of the Hamiltons of Little Earnick, and of Alexander Forbes Irvine, nineteenth laird of Drum. He was a friend of his neighbour Cosmo Innes, and their careers ran in parallel. Other friends included William Forbes Skene of Rubislaw and Sir David Lindsay. He was tutored at home, then studied law at Marischal College in the University of Aberdeen and at the University of Edinburgh. He passed as an advocate in 1848 and rose to be Dean of the Faculty of Advocates. He was Principal Clerk of the Justiciary Court from 1867 to 1874, and Sheriff of Argyll from 1874 to 1891. He inherited Drum in 1861, on his father’s death. In 1878 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, proposed by Sir Alexander Grant, Charles Neaves, Lord Neaves, Edward Sang and Peter Guthrie Tait. He was vice-president of that society from 1883 to 1887 and from 1890 to 1892. In 1886 he co-founded the New Spalding Club. In 1887 the University of Edinburgh gave him an honorary doctorate of laws. He was painted by George Reid. In 1848 he married Anna Margaretta Forbes-Leslie, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Leslie of Rothienorman, a noted amateur archaeologist. Their children were Alexander Charles Quentin Hamilton Irvine, and Francis Hugh Forbes Irvine, who became the twenty-first laird. At his death he was called the head of one of the oldest families in Great Britain.

In 1875 and 1876 Alexander Forbes Irvine arranged a restoration of the courtyard and the addition of an arched entrance and an angle tower. He was also partly responsible for a restoration of the chapel. By 1875 some remodelling of the house had begun and, by inference, had been put into the hands of David Bryce. Bryce died before he could accomplish very much, and his nephew John Bryce carried the commission to completion and was responsible for the final design. The designed landscape names the 1875 alterations as the designs of David Bryce and his nephew John Bryce, and says the earlier architects are unknown. The listing names David Bryce alone for 1875: a new courtyard entrance, staircase and corridors on the north side of the 1619 wing, the northwest part of the courtyard rebuilt, and a new north gateway and angle tower. Interior detail in the Jacobean hall is placed about 1882. After Alexander Forbes Irvine’s death in 1892, his third son Francis succeeded as twenty-first laird, and one study says that with that succession the history of Drum as a building comes to an end. Four lairds followed Francis: his son and two of his grandsons. The twenty-second laird fought in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War.

The end of Irvine occupation is dated in more than one way. One study says the house was the home of the Irvines from 1323 until 1975, when it was left to charitable care, and that in 1975, on the death of Quentin Forbes Irvine, the twenty-fifth laird, the castle passed under the terms of his will. Another account says that in 1964 Mr H. Q. Forbes Irvine, the twenty-fourth laird, agreed that on his death the castle, the policies, the home farm and 170 acres of woodland, including the Old Forest of Drum, would pass into that care, and that in 1976 the agreement came into force, after more than 650 years of Irvine lairds. A third wording keeps the family from 1323 until 1976, and dates trust ownership to 1976. The castle history has also said the family held it until 1975. The twenty-fourth laird and the twenty-fifth, the will and the lifetime agreement, and 1975 and 1976, are all left standing. The male line of Forbes Irvine is said to have continued in the two younger brothers of the last laird and in their sons, and in the Irvines of Straloch and Barra, descended from the younger son of the twenty-first laird.

The tower measures about 53 feet by 40 feet and 70 feet high, rubble-built, with rounded corners and the original battlements carried on corbels. A vaulted basement and two vaults above were each originally divided by timber floors. A wheel stair runs from the first floor to the battlements. The hall and solar were given an inner plaster vault and fitted out as a library about 1840. The only original entrance was on the first floor, reached by a wooden stair, now replaced by a stone forestair, and a door led into the common hall. A mural stair goes down to the cellar, where there is a well. A newel stair in the southeast corner leads up to the laird’s hall. Both the common hall and the laird’s hall contained upper wooden floors. Excavation in the laird’s hall found the stone foundations of a screen toward the east end, with a passageway between the screen and the east wall. A wooden stair led to the upper floor, then to a parapet with its wall-walk and an external garderobe. The parapet is carried round the corners, and the wall-walk is an unusual stepped walk. The Victorians broke through the tower to make a library of the common hall and enlarged the windows in the east and south walls. The library is also placed in the 1840s, as a structure set inside the full height of the stone-vaulted lower hall, using the space of the old timber entresol. A drawing in the house shows it in its present form by 1848 and appears to be the work of Anna Forbes Irvine, though the architectural style looks some fifteen years earlier. It is described as a dignified room, echoing the medieval hall it fills. It now holds about 4,000 books. Access from the main turnpike was through a doorway later blocked, probably when the library was made. That doorway is suggested to have led into a screens passage of timber panels.

The same architectural reading sets three main floors, all stone-vaulted: a ground floor, a low hall, or laigh hall, and a high hall. Timber entresols divided the double-height halls and gave the tower five floors in all. At the roof an open parapet walk runs round the whole tower, and the cap house, a small watch room at the head of the stair, stands above the battlements and likely gave further room. The ground-floor store had no direct door from outside. Today a straight stair from the turnpike serves it. There is some evidence of a second stair, which would have kept service apart from family and guests. A small opening in the ceiling passed goods to the hall. The well protected the water if the household had to shut itself in. Some cooking may have happened there, but meat is unlikely: meat was usually cooked over an open fire, and no such fire was found. The space was mostly storage and preparation, with evidence of some butchery. In the low hall, mural chambers found in the thickness of the walls include a small buttery. A fireplace is on the north wall. The high end, where the laird and family sat, was to the west, opposite the entrance. Which level was the main hall is hard to settle once the library walls are in place. The lower spaces are the likely hall, because of those chambers.

A further small chamber showed as an opening in the outside of the west wall, later blocked with stone. When the blocking was taken out, the chamber was a garderobe, the stone seat still in place, with a passage and a doorway to the hall, and iron fixings for a timber door and latch. In 2013, unblocking of two window openings on the west face of the tower revealed two medieval chambers, one with the remains of a garderobe. In the high hall the space is now one room. It was once divided by an entresol reached by a stair inside the hall, not from the turnpike. It may have been the laird’s private accommodation, though privacy then was not privacy now, and the bedchamber likely held the family and some servants. Windows on all sides, some of the lower ones with stone seats, lit both levels. Timber shutters kept out the weather. A grand arched sandstone fireplace heated the lower floor, and a more modest fireplace, added later, heated the upper. The entresol stood on stone corbels of the same profile as the corbels that carry the outside battlements. From the high hall a door gave onto the parapet walk. A covered garderobe in the northwest corner, a projection called a bretasche, dropped waste into the cesspit below, and in an attack the same opening could be used against anyone at the foot of the west wall.

Inside, the walls would have been lime-plastered, and there are indications in the high hall that tapestries may have hung there. Floors were covered with cut vegetation, and the plants identified at Drum are taken to have come from the nearby riverside. Outside, the tower was harled with lime, sand and water, thrown on by hand, and often coloured. Patches of a mid-nineteenth-century harl survive, pink in tone. The original harl is thought more likely to have been off-white. By the eighteenth century the old tower seems to have been all but abandoned for the newer wings. The barmkin, the fortified enclosure, and the laigh biggins, the low outbuildings, have long since gone. Rounded corners are explained both as a defence, leaving no corner block to be knocked out, and as an easier way to build in hard granite. The small openings are explained both as loops for weapons and as a way to keep out weather when glass was scarce. The ground-floor slits are said in one breath to put an attacker on the back foot, and in another to be too small for active fire and more likely to be vents. The wall-head is both a fighting platform and a place to watch the road through Royal Deeside and the hunting in the Forest of Drum. One reading holds that the Bruce grant very likely required the Irvines to build a fortification, so that the king’s authority and the routes would be visibly controlled, and that the tower was as much a court and a symbol as a refuge.

The ground around the tower has been dug and watched for decades, and several of those digs found nothing. A resistivity survey in September 1988 confirmed that the original courtyard lay to the west, and it recorded linear features in the lawn south of the castle, read as a French garden laid out about 1619, when the ninth laird added the seventeenth-century wing. In June 1998 a watching brief on drainage sumps found no artefacts, but it found earlier ground surfaces in the courtyard and a cobbled strip under the eaves of the chapel. A drainage trench near the chapel found silty sand and a layer of medium stones over bedrock, taken as levelling for the landscaped ground, probably after the early nineteenth century on the evidence of the ceramics. A survey was made in 2000. Removal of a tree stump on the site of the seventeenth-century formal gardens uncovered landscaping that may belong to those gardens. In 2008 trial trenches were commissioned on the ground used for public events. The plan was to open three areas: the south lawn, the ground north of the tower, and the ground west of the castle. The south lawn was so full of surviving archaeology that the other two areas were never opened, for lack of time. Six trenches produced stone walls, a path and an area of paving, two prehistoric flints that had been redeposited, and sherds of possible medieval pottery and tiles. The reading offered is that the part of the garden nearest the mansion was a walled garden, possibly with simple geometric patterns. Beyond a wall, the south part had a long border along the south side, a wide path beside it and round the perimeter, and an enclosed area that may have been divided into slightly raised beds separated by narrow paths and held by low drystone walls.

In 2013, besides the chambers in the west wall, a watching brief in June and July on drainage in the field southeast of the castle recorded no features and no artefacts. A search along the south and southwest edge of the south lawn failed to find a well marked on an annotated estate copy of the 1899 map, though a well-built stone channel was recorded, which may have taken runoff from that well. Geophysical survey in July 2013 mapped many elements of the formal garden in the south lawn. Ground-penetrating radar over gravel, tarmac and paving found several anomalies, including possible footings of a wall tied to the tower and possible structures in the northeast of the courtyard. In May 2014 excavation in three areas around the tower recorded, in the courtyard, a large stone-lined cesspit that would have taken waste from two garderobes inside the tower. A report of the same dig says the pit collected waste from two toilets in the tower and from an outdoor toilet, and that animal bones and medieval pottery were found in the upper levels. The hope, not a find, was that grains, seeds, fish bones and other food remains might be preserved lower down. Shannon Fraser, archaeologist for the eastern region, said the project was a chance to fit pieces of the castle’s history together and to understand better how people had lived in it over the centuries. In the angle between the tower and the brewhouse, the 2014 dig recorded a building that abutted both and may have been a brewing room. Documentary evidence for it is limited. It is suggested that an engraving of 1831 shows it. South of the tower the trench found demolition rubble from a chimney built against the east wall of the cross range and shown in an oil painting of the 1850s, though it is not clear when the chimney was built, and it found a path shown in the same painting. It found no foundations of an earlier building against the hall on that side. Dressed stones reused in the seventeenth-century path and courtyard, and associated with the cross range, are taken as evidence of a stone building demolished in the early seventeenth century. In November 2014 a watching brief during resurfacing in the courtyard recorded the base of the wall of the fourteenth-century tower.

In March 2016 a watching brief on a drainage trench for the path west of the castle, toward the car park, recorded cobbles that may be an earlier path, and no other features. From October to November 2016 a watching brief on a replacement drain, from the southwest corner along the south front and north to the east of the castle, found what appears to be a construction level south of the castle and then a levelling of that ground. Steps at the southwest corner appear to be of the seventeenth century and may belong to the formal gardens of that century. In April 2017 a watching brief on more than 60 metres of drainage ditches along the southern edge of the south lawn uncovered a fully working hand-built stone culvert, which was kept and used in the new drainage. No other features or finds were recorded. On 7 May 2024 a watching brief during the digging of a trench for cable ducting on the east side of the castle found plastic, metal and ceramic drains in the north half of the trench. The south of the trench had already been disturbed by communication cables. No archaeological finds or features were identified.

The finds listed for the place, without a year on most of them, include a shoe, a perforated object, an arrowhead, pins, coins, a sherd, a nail, a chape, a strap end, a sheet, a spike, a rope, and a wall. One coin is dated to the post-medieval span from 1561 to 1899. They are not tied in that list to a particular trench.

The Old Wood of Drum, or the Old Forest of Drum, adjoins the castle to the northwest and is given as 117 acres. It is called the only block of mature oak woodland in lower Deeside. Oaks are known to have been well established there in the sixteenth century, and the wood is also dated to the 1500s. A ship launched in 1609 was built from timber of the Old Woods of Drum. It is uncertain whether the oaks are indigenous. The wood is marked on General Roy’s map of about 1750. It is also described as oak trees dating from the 1700s, and as the last remnants of the ancient oak forest given to the Irvine family with the royal forest in 1323. Those ages, the sixteenth century, the 1500s, a ship of 1609, and oaks of the 1700s, are all stated. The wood is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and it is given outstanding value for nature conservation. Within the oak canopy, species rhododendron were planted by the twenty-fourth laird. Conifer plantations outside the old forest were put in mainly since the Second World War. Red kites, roe deer, red squirrels and badgers are named as living in the wood.

The parkland around the castle in the early nineteenth century appears to have encircled it, except for planting around the chapel to the southwest. On a map of about 1860 the west drive comes out of the woodland through the park, and the east drive sweeps up to the south side of the castle. A grander east drive, of the late nineteenth century, was designed to arrive at the north side. An older avenue ran about a mile, or 2 kilometres, through Robbie Rossie’s Wood and the Avenue Plantation to the East Lodge. Robbie Rossie’s Loch lies in that wood, north of the old east drive, outside the inventory boundary. The East Lodge, or Drum Castle Lodge, is nineteenth century, stands at the end of the east drive, and was added to the lists in category B. It lies outside the inventory boundary. Parkland trees are generally of about 1870 and include ash and sycamore. Some beech on the drive dates from the late eighteenth-century layout. Two sweet chestnuts of about 1820 to 1830 stand close to the castle. A nine-hole golf course was at one time laid out in the park, probably to the north. An arboretum east and south of the castle is placed in the late nineteenth century and also in the early 1900s. Between 1910 and 1950 a small water garden was made between the castle and the walled garden. Since 1976 a car park has stood to the west, and birch has been planted on the eastern boundary. The remaining parkland is grazed.

The walled garden is thought to date from the late eighteenth century, and an account of 1796 paid for building a new garden wall. A garden already existed in 1775. Its walls were improved between 1778 and 1787, and produce was sold from it in 1780. It is not known whether that earlier garden stood on the present site. A map of about 1860 shows two cross paths inside the walls, four equal compartments, and a fountain at the centre. A gardener’s cottage and a laundry stand with the eighteenth-century walled garden to the northeast of the house, and the laundry adjoins the south wall of the garden. The walled garden is listed in category B. When the property passed into charitable care in 1976 the garden was kept in something like the old plan. Shortage of labour led to other uses, the last a leased market garden. In 1987 the garden was derelict, though some glasshouses remained and a few old fruit trees lined the inner walls. To the south, in an outer enclosure, potatoes and Christmas trees had been planted. Between 1989 and 1991 the garden is described as a blank canvas, and what stands there now as the work done since. It was laid out as a display of historic roses in 1991. The visit to the garden is now divided into quadrants that show how roses were cultivated from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. A 2021 account of the same garden splits it into four periods: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an eighteenth-century bosquet, the Victorian garden, and a naturalistic twentieth-century garden. The seventeenth-to-twentieth-century quadrants and the sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century first quarter are both given.

The castle was once served by Drum railway station on the Deeside Railway. The service was discontinued in 1951. During 2019, 47,446 people visited. The tower is at present not open to visitors, because of structural repairs. The open walkway and the stone of the crenellations are exposed to the weather and need continual work if they are to stay watertight. Heavier rainfall is treated as a greater threat, and ways of dealing with water at the top of the tower are under investigation, including a sensitive covering of the wall-walk and the wall-heads so that water does not enter the masonry. That covering is described as a possible first step in a project of several years, while the water is managed and the tower begins to dry. The castle, the shop, the tearoom and the walled garden are open from 2 November to 28 March 2027, Thursday to Sunday, from 10.30 to 16.00, by guided tour, with last entry at 3.15, and with the garden depending on the weather. The grounds are open every day of the year from dawn to dusk.

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