# Dunrobin Castle

castle in Golspie, Sutherland, Highland, Scotland, UK

Highland, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1845 CE

## Story

• Dunrobin Castle, on the terrace above the shore at Golspie, is the seat of the Earls of Sutherland and the largest house in the northern Highlands, with 189 rooms.
• A vaulted keep with an iron yett, first mentioned in 1401, survives inside later courtyards, an eighteenth-century wing, and the great mid-nineteenth-century remodelling.
• In the Jacobite rising of 1745 the house was stormed, and the seventeenth earl escaped by a back door to join the government army.
• Fire in 1915, while the castle was a naval hospital, destroyed much of the newer interior, which was then rebuilt.
• The museum holds Pictish stones from the coast, including the symbol stone found in the Dairy Park in 1977 over a woman’s grave.
• The house was a boys’ boarding school from 1965 to 1972, and it has been open to visitors since 1973.

## Visiting

The castle is open daily from 1 April to 31 October. From April to September it is open from 10.00 am to 5.30 pm, and last entry is 4.30 pm. In October it is open from 10.30 am to 5.00 pm, and last entry is 4.00 pm. The castle and gardens are closed on every day from 1 November to 31 March.
Admission is £16.00 for an adult aged 17 or over, £14.00 concession, £10.00 for a child aged 6 or over, and £47.00 for a family of two adults and up to three children, and children under six are free. Tickets include admission to the castle, the museum and the gardens, and there is no gardens-only ticket. The ticket is an all-day pass to 18 rooms, the gardens and the museum. Museum opening hours are 10.30 to 16.00 daily.
Entry is self-guided, and guided tours are not offered during the open season or while the castle is closed. Dogs are not allowed in the castle or the formal gardens, except assistance dogs. The use of drones is not allowed in the gardens or grounds because of the birds of prey. Photos can be taken throughout the castle without flash.
Bags larger than A4 are not allowed in the castle rooms. Pushchairs are not allowed on the upstairs tour. Back carriers are not allowed. Entry is not possible in several areas for a visitor using a wheelchair, wheelchair access to the gardens can be arranged on request, and wheelchairs are not available for use.
Last entry requires that left luggage be collected from the cloakroom, and there is no charge for the cloakroom. Access to the tearoom is for ticket holders only. The tearoom is open daily from 10.00 am to 4.30 pm from April to September, and from 10.30 am to 4.00 pm in October. The gift shop is open daily from 10.30 am to 4.30 pm in April and October, and from 10.00 am to 5.00 pm from May to September.
Admission includes birds of prey flying demonstrations at 11.30 am and 2.30 pm from 1 April to 31 October. Discounted admission is offered to concession holders, to students with accepted proof of status, to Blue Light Card holders, to service and armed forces visitors, and to groups of 10 or more, and carers go free. Groups of 10 or more should book tickets in advance. One membership scheme gives free admission to the castle and gardens, and another gives free admission to the gardens only.
A Young Scot National Entitlement card is not accepted for discounted student admission.

## History

Dunrobin Castle stands on a rocky terrace above the shore at Golspie, in Sutherland, and it is the seat of the Earl of Sutherland, chief of Clan Sutherland. It is the largest house in the northern Highlands, with 189 rooms, and it is counted among the oldest inhabited houses in Scotland. The distance from Golspie is given as one mile, as half a mile, and as one mile to the north-east, and the water it overlooks is given both as the Dornoch Firth and as the Moray Firth.

The lands came to Hugh, Lord of Duffus, before 1211, and a clan account dates the grant to 1197. Hugh de Moravia died about 1219. He was a grandson of Freskin, the Flemish settler of David I’s reign, or, in other accounts, Freskin’s son or second son. Freskin’s line is also the Murray line.

The House of Moray, whose power was greatest under Macbeth from 1040 to 1057, is the house from which the earls are surmised to descend in the female line. William de Moravia, 1st Earl of Sutherland, born about 1210 and dead in 1248, received the earldom around 1235, though he was already Lord of Sutherland before 1222. A later genealogy instead made a Robert Sutherland the founder of the castle and pushed the family back to a thane named Alane.

The keep, with an iron yett and stone vaults on each floor, is first mentioned in 1401, in the time of Robert Sutherland, 6th Earl of Sutherland. The walls are about six feet thick. His death is placed in 1444 and in 1427, and the castle’s name is taken from him, as Robin’s hill or fort. The tower may stand on an older fort, but visits in 1962 and 1976 found nothing earlier than the tower house, by then enclosed in later building.

John Sutherland, 8th Earl of Sutherland, died in 1508 after a brief of idiocy in 1494. His son, the ninth earl, died in 1514, and the inheritance is also told as a passage in 1512 to Adam Gordon through Elizabeth, and as the end of the Freskin line in 1514. In 1518 Alexander Sutherland took the castle and was killed, his head set on a spear on the tower. A son of his was killed in the garden in 1550.

Another Alexander was killed at Alltachuilain in 1519 or 1520.

A courtyard house was added to the south-west in the seventeenth century. By about 1600 a son of the twelfth earl described orchards, saffron, rosemary, pears and cherries on a mote by the sea. William Sutherland, 17th Earl of Sutherland, born William Gordon in 1708, succeeded in 1733. In the Jacobite rising of 1745, Charles Edward Stuart’s men stormed the house because the clan stood with the government.

The earl escaped by a back door, sailed to Aberdeen, and joined Prince William, Duke of Cumberland. He fought at Culloden on 16 April 1746, after a clan company had already fought at Littleferry. He died at Montauban in 1750.

His granddaughter Elizabeth was born in 1765, confirmed in the earldom by the House of Lords in 1771, and in 1785 married George Leveson-Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland. He died at Dunrobin on 19 July 1833, a date also given as 1834, and he had been duke only since January 1833, or, in one account, since 1832. The wing of 1785, also dated 1788 to 1795, is associated with John McLeran. From about 1807 the couple’s improvements on the estate became the Highland Clearances, with the great removals of 1814, 1819 and 1820, the trial and acquittal of Patrick Sellar, and the year of the burnings.

Elizabeth died in London in 1839 and was buried at Dornoch. The statue on Ben Bhraggie was raised in 1837.

George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 2nd Duke of Sutherland, born in 1786 on the 8th or the 11th of August and dead in 1861, commissioned the great remodelling. Charles Barry, architect of the Palace of Westminster, is credited with work from 1835 to 1850, with a commission in 1845, and with the north front of 1844 to 1848 shared with William Leslie of Aberdeen. It is not settled which of the two men designed the house. The manner is Scottish Baronial and French château, and the pyramidal entrance roof is in the manner of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who did not work here.

Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone. The entrance tower is 135 feet high. The gardens, finished in 1850 and laid out from about 1848, follow the formal French manner Barry had used at Trentham, with two parterres in one count and three in another. The landscaped ground covers 1,379 acres.

A private station opened in 1870, was also dated as a public opening on 1 November 1870 and a return to private use in 1871, and the waiting room of 1902 is listed in category B. In 1915, during the First World War, fire damaged the newer rooms while the house was a naval hospital. Robert Lorimer restored it, in 1919 or 1920, and kept woodwork attributed to Grinling Gibbons. The drawing room, made from two rooms, holds paintings by Canaletto and portraits by John Hoppner and Joshua Reynolds.

The library holds a portrait of Eileen Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland, by Philip de László, and a mahogany table by Thomas Chippendale.

George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 5th Duke of Sutherland, died on 1 February 1963, a death also placed in 1966. The earldom and the castle passed to his niece, Elizabeth Sutherland, 24th Countess of Sutherland, and the dukedom passed to John Egerton, 6th Duke of Sutherland, who did not inherit the house. From 1965 to 1972 Dunrobin was a boys’ boarding school. It has been open to visitors since 1973.

The castle was listed in category A on 18 March 1971, and the designed landscape was added to the inventory of gardens on 1 July 1987.

The museum, in the old summer house, keeps Pictish stones from the coast and the trophy and ethnographic collections of the family. On 23 February 1977 a symbol stone was ploughed up in the Dairy Park. Excavation found it over the cist of a woman, with uncalibrated dates of 660 and 625, each plus or minus fifty years, and a 2017 calibrated date of 576 to 621. The stone is in the museum.

An inventory of the collection was made in 2019, and a Golspie cross-slab in the museum was recorded again on 22 May 2023.

## Photographs

- [Dunrobin Castle frontage — Imamon~commonswiki](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/DunrobinCastle1.JPG)
- [Beach south of Brora. A small section of pebbles on an otherwise sandy coast. Dunrobin Castle and the Duke of Sutherland monument in the distance. — Gordon Hatton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Beach_south_of_Brora_-_geograph.org.uk_-_129075.jpg)
- [Bluebell woods at Dunrobin Castle Carpets of bluebells in the woodland between Dunrobin Castle and the shore path. — Gordon Hatton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Bluebell_woods_at_Dunrobin_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_296667.jpg)
- [Autumn at Dunrobin Castle — sylvia duckworth](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Autumn_at_Dunrobin_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1030906.jpg)
- [Dunrobin Castle North front of castle. View taken from public car park. — Andrew Hackney](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Dunrobin_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1234249.jpg)
- [Dunrobin Castle Late evening on Dunrobin Castle. — Colin Kinnear](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Dunrobin_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1275429.jpg)
- [Clouds over Dunrobin — Peter Moore](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Clouds_over_Dunrobin_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1805867.jpg)
- [IMG_0244 [640x480] — Carlos Menendez San Juan](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/CMSJ_IMG_0244_%28640x480%29_%283870339576%29.jpg)
- [The English flower garden and home grounds: design and arrangement shown by existing examples of gardens in Great Britain and Ireland, followed by a — Robinson, W](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/The_English_flower_garden_and_home_grounds_%28Page_86%29_BHL20204945.jpg)
- [Dunrobin Castle — Bewahrerderwerte](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/2018_07_11_Schottland_%2863%29.jpg)

## Sources

- [Dunrobin Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunrobin_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Castle](https://www.dunrobincastle.co.uk/castle/) — Dunrobin Castle
- [Garden](https://www.dunrobincastle.co.uk/garden/) — Dunrobin Castle
- [Plan a visit](https://www.dunrobincastle.co.uk/plan-a-visit/) — Dunrobin Castle
- [Frequently asked questions](https://www.dunrobincastle.co.uk/faqs/) — Dunrobin Castle
- [Dunrobin Castle, listed building](https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/LB7044) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Dunrobin Castle, garden and designed landscape](https://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/GDL00160) — Historic Environment Scotland
- [Dunrobin Castle](https://her.highland.gov.uk/monument/MHG39728) — Highland Historic Environment Record
- [Cists and symbol stone, Dairy Park, Golspie](https://her.highland.gov.uk/Monument/MHG39733) — Highland Historic Environment Record
- [Excavations in the Dairy Park, Dunrobin, Sutherland, 1977](https://doi.org/10.9750/psas.110.328.345) — Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
- [Dunrobin 2: The princess and the snake](https://highlandpictishtrail.co.uk/dunrobin-2-the-princess-and-the-snake/) — Highland Pictish Trail
- [Golspie ogham stone](https://ogham.celt.dias.ie/S-SUT-001) — Ogham in 3D
- [Finds collection at Dunrobin Castle Museum](https://her.highland.gov.uk/Source/SHG28514) — Highland Historic Environment Record
- [Charles Barry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Barry) — Wikipedia
- [George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 2nd Duke of Sutherland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sutherland-Leveson-Gower,_2nd_Duke_of_Sutherland) — Wikipedia
- [Charles Edward Stuart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Edward_Stuart) — Wikipedia
- [Eugène Viollet-le-Duc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Viollet-le-Duc) — Wikipedia
- [Grinling Gibbons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinling_Gibbons) — Wikipedia
- [John Hoppner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hoppner) — Wikipedia
- [Joshua Reynolds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Reynolds) — Wikipedia
- [Robert Lorimer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lorimer) — Wikipedia
- [George Leveson-Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Leveson-Gower,_1st_Duke_of_Sutherland) — Wikipedia
- [Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Leveson-Gower,_Duchess_of_Sutherland) — Wikipedia
- [Jacobite rising of 1745](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobite_rising_of_1745) — Wikipedia
- [William Sutherland, 17th Earl of Sutherland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sutherland,_17th_Earl_of_Sutherland) — Wikipedia
- [John Sutherland, 8th Earl of Sutherland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutherland,_8th_Earl_of_Sutherland) — Wikipedia
- [Clan Sutherland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Sutherland) — Wikipedia
- [Freskin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freskin) — Wikipedia
- [Elizabeth Sutherland, 24th Countess of Sutherland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Sutherland,_24th_Countess_of_Sutherland) — Wikipedia
- [Dunrobin Castle railway station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunrobin_Castle_railway_station) — Wikipedia
- [DunrobinCastle1.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DunrobinCastle1.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Beach south of Brora - geograph.org.uk - 129075.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beach_south_of_Brora_-_geograph.org.uk_-_129075.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Bluebell woods at Dunrobin Castle - geograph.org.uk - 296667.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bluebell_woods_at_Dunrobin_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_296667.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Autumn at Dunrobin Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1030906.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Autumn_at_Dunrobin_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1030906.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Dunrobin Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1234249.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunrobin_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1234249.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Dunrobin Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1275429.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunrobin_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1275429.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Clouds over Dunrobin - geograph.org.uk - 1805867.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clouds_over_Dunrobin_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1805867.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [CMSJ IMG 0244 (640x480) (3870339576).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CMSJ_IMG_0244_(640x480)_(3870339576).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [The English flower garden and home grounds (Page 86) BHL20204945.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_English_flower_garden_and_home_grounds_(Page_86)_BHL20204945.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [2018 07 11 Schottland (63).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2018_07_11_Schottland_(63).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Dunrobin Castle stands on a rocky terrace above the shore at Golspie in Sutherland, in the Highland area of Scotland, and it is the family seat of the Earl of Sutherland, chief of Clan Sutherland. It is described as one mile north of Golspie, as half a mile north of the village, and as one mile north-east of the town, and as about five miles south of Brora. One account places it overlooking the Dornoch Firth. Another places it overlooking the Moray Firth, and the designed landscape is also set eleven miles north of the Dornoch Firth, with views across the Moray Firth to the north coast of Moray. The house is called the most northerly of Scotland’s great houses and the largest in the northern Highlands, with 189 rooms. It is also called one of Britain’s oldest continuously inhabited houses, with a history taken back to the early 1300s, to a foundation in 1275, and to a family seat since the twelfth century.

The lands of Sutherland were acquired before 1211 by Hugh, Lord of Duffus, and a clan account gives the grant as 1197 from William the Lion. Hugh de Moravia, also called Hugh Freskyn, died about 1219. He is the eldest son of William, eldest son of Freskin, in the account that is generally accepted, and he inherited Strathbrock in West Lothian and Duffus, Roseisle, Inchkeil, Machir and Kintrae in Moray, a grant to his father from William I between 1165 and 1171. He was given a large estate around 1210 and was known as Lord of Sutherland. His children were William de Moravia, Earl of Sutherland, who died in 1248, Walter de Moravia, lord of Duffus, and Andrew de Moravia, bishop of Moray, who died in 1242. Another account makes Hugh the son of Freskin rather than the grandson. Another makes Hugh the second son of Freskin and the first Lord of Sutherland. A seventeenth-century family genealogy instead makes the first earl the son of a Hugh nicknamed Hugh Freskin, son of a Robert Sutherland who founded Dunrobin Castle, son of Walter Southerland, son of Alane Southerland, thane of Sutherland.

Freskin died before 1171. He was a Flemish nobleman who settled in Scotland in the reign of David I and is taken as the progenitor of the Murray and Sutherland families. His name is Flemish. He held Strathbrock and the Moray lands of Duffus and its neighbours from David. Flemings were settled in Moray after the rising of Angus, Earl of Moray, in 1130, in place of a Gaelic nobility that had resisted the kings. It has been claimed that Freskin married a woman who claimed descent from the old Picto-Moravian royal house, and that he probably had one son, William, who took the name de Moravia. Hugh and Andrew are sometimes called sons of Freskin and sometimes sons of William. The Murrays bear three silver stars on blue, and the Sutherlands three gold stars on red. The House of Moray, or Clann Ruaidrí, is the name used for the rulers based in Moray who sometimes ruled a larger kingdom. They are in the record from the killing of Findláech mac Ruaidrí in 1020, and they reached their greatest power with Macbeth between 1040 and 1057. The earldom’s origin is surmised to include descent from that house in the female line. The name Sutherland is the south land of the Norse earldom of Orkney and Caithness. The motto of Clan Sutherland is Sans Peur, French for Without Fear.

William de Moravia, 1st Earl of Sutherland, also called William Sutherland, was born about 1210 and died in 1248. The earldom was created around 1235, and also in the 1230s. A charter already calls him William, Lord of Sutherland, before 1222, when he confirmed Skelbo and other lands to Gilbert de Moravia, archdeacon of Moray. He is thought to have attended Alexander II at the end of 1222 when the king marched against the men of Caithness who had murdered their bishop. One account has the Freskins helping to crush the rising of Gillescop in 1228, and has William raised to the earldom to balance the earl of Caithness. Another theory ties the earldom to the death of Jon Haraldsson in 1231 and to Earl Magnus, but the territory is also said to have left Norwegian allegiance long before and to have been in the hands of Hugh and his son already. William was buried in the south aisle of Dornoch Cathedral. He helped Gilbert de Moravia, bishop of Caithness, who planned the cathedral and fourteen parish churches, and he also feuded with the bishop over lands before Gilbert’s death in 1245. At the Battle of Embo he sent Richard de Moravia, the bishop’s brother, against Norwegian raiders. Richard was killed, the earl came up with reinforcements, the raiders’ leader was killed, and the earl raised a tomb for Richard in the cathedral. His only known son was the second earl.

Later earls fought in the wars of independence. William, the third earl, fought at Bannockburn in 1314. Kenneth, the fourth earl, was killed at Halidon Hill in 1333. William, the fifth earl, married Margaret, daughter of Robert the Bruce and sister of David II, and he was captured with David at Neville’s Cross in 1346. Their son John was named heir to the throne ahead of Robert Stewart, who became Robert II in 1371. The same earl was killed by the Mackays in 1370. One account of the castle says Robert the Bruce planted the Gordons, supporters of his claim, at Huntly in Aberdeenshire, and that they were created earls of Huntly in 1445. The account of Clan Gordon places their support in those wars with William Wallace, and places a later passage of the chiefship through an heiress into the Seton family, whose male descendants took the name Gordon. The chief of Clan Gordon is the Earl of Huntly, later the Marquess of Huntly, and the seat is now Aboyne Castle. In the sixteenth century the Gordons, as Catholics, feuded with Clan Forbes and met the Protestant earl of Argyll at Glenlivet.

The oldest surviving part of Dunrobin, with an iron yett, is first mentioned in 1401, in the time of Robert Sutherland, 6th Earl of Sutherland. The keep is also said to have been built about 1401, and to be a fourteenth-century square tower. It stands at the north-east angle. The walls are over six feet thick, and are also given as six feet thick. Each floor was vaulted in stone rather than ceiled in timber, which is unusual. The castle may stand on an early medieval fort. Visits on 4 April 1962 and 19 January 1976 found no evidence of any structure older than the tower house, and found the tower house entirely enclosed by later work, so that the outside reads as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century building. The name Dun Robin is taken to mean Robin’s hill or fort in Gaelic, and the house is thought to be named for Robert, the sixth earl. His death is given as 1444 and as 1427. He was the son of William, the fifth earl, and of Joanna, daughter of Sir John Menteith. A seventeenth-century list inserted an Earl John and an Earl Nicolas between William and Robert, and a later investigation removed them. In 1389 Robert witnessed a decree against Alexander Stewart, earl of Buchan, the Wolf of Badenoch. He is placed at the gathering at Southdean in the Forest of Jedburgh that led to the Battle of Otterburn in 1388. In 1431, in his time, the Battle of Drumnacoub was fought on the slopes of Ben Loyal near Tongue, where Angus Du Mackay defeated Angus Murray and the Sutherlands. From this Robert onward the earls used the surname Sutherland.

John Sutherland, 8th Earl of Sutherland, died in 1508, after more than forty years in the earldom. He succeeded because his elder brother Alexander, Master of Sutherland, had died between 1444 and 1456. In 1467 he received Spinningdale and Pulrossie. In 1471 he granted charters at Dornoch. In 1476 the Lords auditors found against him in a dispute over Cragton, perhaps Culmaily in Golspie. In 1494 the Lords of Council found that he and his accomplices had done wrong in taking Skelbo Castle and two children of John Murray, ordered the castle delivered to Thomas Kinnaird, the children freed, and 100 merks paid. A brief of idiocy was issued by James IV in 1494. Sheriffs were sworn for the inquest, the proceedings themselves were not kept, and the earl was placed under a tutor. In February 1499 the Lords of Council ordered him and his minor son brought to the king. A family narrative says that two sons of his illegitimate brother Thomas angered him and that he ordered them killed, one of them inside Dunrobin Castle, the other overtaken and killed after he had fled wounded. The same narrative charges him with unkindness to his mother, with pulling down her building at Helmsdale, and with forcing her into a second marriage. A later examination found that charge of a forced marriage unfounded, and put his difficulties down to the mental weakness already marked by the brief of 1494. His death in 1508 is the family historian’s year, and the papers that would have confirmed it were later missing from the charter chest. His heir was John, the ninth earl, who died in 1514. A building account instead ends the Freskin line in 1514 and gives the title to Elizabeth Gordon, sister of a fifth earl who died in 1514. Another account says Elizabeth Sutherland succeeded her brother the ninth earl. The castle account says the eighth earl died in 1508 and gave his daughter Elizabeth in marriage to Adam Gordon, that her elder brother was then declared heir, and that a brief of idiocy against him and his younger brother put the estate in Adam Gordon’s hands in 1512.

Elizabeth became the tenth countess in the family reckoning and married Adam Gordon, a younger son of George Gordon, second earl of Huntly and chief of Clan Gordon. In 1518, while Adam was absent, Alexander Sutherland took the castle. He is called the legitimate heir in that account. The Gordons retook the house, captured him, and set his head on a spear on the tower. His son John attacked in 1550 and was killed in the castle garden. A separate Alexander, recorded as an illegitimate son of the eighth earl and first of Killipheder, disputed the earldom with Elizabeth and Adam and was killed by the Gordons at the Battle of Alltachuilain in 1519 or 1520. In 1567 the eleventh earl and the countess were murdered at Helmsdale Castle. Through the sixteenth century the earldom had passed by that Gordon marriage, and the chiefs of Clan Sutherland were Gordons until a later earl took the name Sutherland back.

The early keep stood alone for about two hundred years. A staircase and a high house were then added. In the seventeenth century a large house was built around a courtyard to the south-west and joined to the keep by a turnpike stair. The same century produced an L-plan tower-house wing with angle turrets and a drum stair tower with small pedimented windows. A garden was already recorded by about 1600. A son of the twelfth earl, named Sir Robert Gordon in one account and Sir Richard Gordon in another, described a house well seated upon a mote hard by the sea, with fair orchards and pleasant gardens planted with the fruits, herbs and flowers used in the kingdom, abundance of good saffron and rosemary, and excellent fruit, chiefly pears and cherries. He lived from 1580 to 1656 and was a younger son of Alexander Gordon, the twelfth earl. A sundial in the policies is dated 1616. The seventeenth-century garden pavilion and walled garden are attributed to the sixteenth earl, and the pavilion is a square building of two storeys, now the museum.

William Sutherland, 17th Earl of Sutherland, was born William Gordon on 2 October 1708 and died in 1750. He succeeded his grandfather John Gordon, the sixteenth earl, on 27 June 1733, and the summer house is said to have been designed in 1732 for him while he was still Lord Strathnaver. It is also described as built for William, Earl of Sutherland, and as built for the sixteenth earl. He had made a grand tour in France and Hanover from 1726 to 1727. He was returned to Parliament for Sutherland in 1727 at the age of eighteen, his grandfather hoping that a rule against the eldest sons of Scottish peers sitting in the Commons would not be used against a grandson. In 1730 he claimed repayment for arms given up under the Disarming Act, and the claim was deferred because some of the receipts looked suspicious. He voted with the administration on the Hessians in 1730 and on the Excise Bill in 1733. When he became earl on 27 June 1733 he left the Commons. He was said to have agreed to vote for the court’s list of representative peers if he were made one of them, which happened in 1734. He was a lord of police at £800 a year, with a pension of £1,200 a year, and from 1744 he was first lord of police. His marriage contract with Elizabeth Wemyss, daughter of the third earl of Wemyss, was signed on 17 April 1734. Their son William became the eighteenth earl and lived from 1735 to 1766.

During the Jacobite rising of 1745 the earl supported the government and raised two independent companies. Charles Edward Stuart, born in Rome on 31 December 1720 and the elder son of James Francis Edward Stuart, landed in the west of Scotland after a French invasion plan failed, and he raised his standard at Glenfinnan on 19 August 1745. Edinburgh was entered on 17 September, and on 21 September the government army under John Cope was scattered at Prestonpans. The Jacobite army reached Derby on 4 December and then turned back. It won a narrow victory at Falkirk Muir in January 1746. The men of Charles Edward Stuart stormed Dunrobin without warning because Clan Sutherland supported the government. The seventeenth earl escaped by a back door and sailed for Aberdeen, where he joined the army of Prince William, Duke of Cumberland. One day before Culloden, an independent company raised from the clan by the earl fought at the Battle of Littleferry on the government side, and the Jacobites there were defeated. Culloden itself was fought on 16 April 1746 and lasted less than an hour. Cumberland had come from Aberdeen, which he reached on 27 February, and he resumed the advance on 8 April. The earl was present at Culloden. Afterwards he had to argue in London that he had not held Jacobite sympathies. He lost the police post in 1747 after joining the party of Frederick, Prince of Wales, wrote to the Duke of Newcastle on 30 July 1747 about his spending in the rising, and waited about the court for two years while his mother managed the Scottish estates. He died at Montauban in France on 7 December 1750, in debt by £15,797. He was buried at Holyrood Abbey in the grave of the fifteenth earl. Charles Edward Stuart died in Rome on 30 January 1788.

On the death of the eighteenth earl in 1766 the house passed to his daughter Elizabeth, an infant. Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland, was born Elizabeth Sutherland at Leven Lodge near Edinburgh on 24 May 1765 and died on 29 January 1839. Her parents, the eighteenth earl and Mary Maxwell, died of typhus in Bath in 1766, a few weeks after her first birthday. Her right to the earldom was contested by George Sutherland of Forse and by Sir Robert Gordon, a baronet, and the House of Lords confirmed it in 1771. On 4 September 1785, at St Marylebone, she married George Leveson-Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland. He was born George Granville Leveson-Gower on 9 January 1758, and he was then Viscount Trentham. He died at Dunrobin Castle on 19 July 1833, aged seventy-five, eleven years after a paralytic stroke. A building account gives his death as 1834. He was ambassador to France from 1790 to 1792, appointed in June 1790, and the embassy closed after the insurrection of 10 August 1792. He was created Duke of Sutherland on 28 January 1833, and he is also said to have been created duke in 1832, six months before he died. He held the title for less than six months. He was the wealthiest man in Britain in the latter part of his life, with the Bridgewater Canal and a great picture collection coming from his uncle Francis Egerton, third duke of Bridgewater, in 1803. He was called a leviathan of wealth. Elizabeth became known as the Duchess-Countess. In 1785 the house was altered and extended. The wing is also dated 1788 to 1795. The improvements of about 1785 are signed J.M. and are taken to be the work of John McLeran. The early keep survived inside these additions.

The same couple began the agricultural changes on the Sutherland estates around 1807, and those changes became the Highland Clearances. Some clearance had been planned as early as 1772, when Elizabeth was a child, and stopped for lack of money until the Bridgewater fortune arrived. She travelled to Dunrobin most summers and corresponded with the factor and with James Loch, the Stafford commissioner. Many leases ran until 1807. The first large sheep farm was let at Lairg in 1807 and removed about three hundred people. William Young and Patrick Sellar arrived in 1809. Clearances in Assynt in 1812 resettled tenants on the coast. In the strath of Kildonan in 1813 a confrontation lasted more than six weeks and the army was called. In Strathnaver at Whitsun 1814, about 430 families, an estimated two thousand people, were removed from Strathnaver and Brora. On 13 June 1814 the roof timbers at Badinloskin, the house of William Chisholm, were burned. Accounts differ on whether his elderly mother-in-law was still inside or had been carried to an outbuilding. She died six days later. Sellar was tried for culpable homicide and arson in 1816 and acquitted. Further clearances in 1819 and 1820 moved about 425 families and then 522. The year 1819 was remembered as the year of the burnings. A smaller clearance at Achness and Ascoilmore in 1821 needed the military. Major planned clearance was stopped at the end of 1821, with smaller removals for about twenty years more. The countess was blamed for the Sutherland Clearances, and the duke was called a liberal reformer. He was also Lord Lieutenant of Sutherland from 1794 to 1830. He was buried at Dornoch Cathedral. Elizabeth died at Hamilton Place, Hyde Park, on 29 January 1839, aged seventy-three, and was buried at Dornoch on 20 February 1839. Away from public business she painted watercolours of the Sutherland coast and of Dunrobin Castle, and she drew and etched views in Orkney and on the north-east coast that were published between 1805 and 1807. Between 1835 and 1837 a duchess of Sutherland sponsored a major restoration of Dornoch Cathedral. An estranged duchess of Sutherland built Carbisdale Castle, near Ardgay, in the nineteenth century. A monument known as the Mannie was raised on Ben Bhraggie near Golspie in 1837. In 1994 a proposal was made to demolish it, and then to move it to the grounds of Dunrobin. Vandals tried to topple it in November 2011. It was still standing in March 2026.

George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 2nd Duke of Sutherland, was born at Portland Place in London on 8 August 1786, and his birth is also given as 11 August 1786. He died on 27 February 1861. He was styled Viscount Trentham until 1803, Earl Gower until 1833, and Marquess of Stafford in 1833. He was educated at Harrow from 1798 to 1803 and at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1806 and 1810, with a doctorate in 1841. He travelled in Prussia and Russia between 1806 and 1808 and commanded the Sutherland Local Militia in 1809. He sat in the Commons for St Mawes from 1808, for Newcastle-under-Lyme from 1812 to 1815, and for Staffordshire until 1820. He played three cricket matches in 1816. His father died in 1833, six months after the dukedom was given for support of the Reform Act, and his mother died in 1839, so he became twentieth earl as well as second duke. He added the surname Sutherland. He was Lord Lieutenant of Sutherland from 1831 until his death, a Knight of the Garter in 1841, a founder of the Roxburghe Club in 1812, a trustee of the National Gallery from 1835, and a trustee of the British Museum from 1841. On 28 May 1823 he married Harriet Elizabeth Georgiana Howard, daughter of the sixth earl of Carlisle. They had eleven children, among them the third duke, born in 1828. Harriet died in 1868. It was this duke who had the castle remodelled. His English seat was Trentham, where Charles Barry worked on the house from 1833 to 1842 while also rebuilding the Palace of Westminster, and where Barry laid out formal gardens in the 1840s over an earlier serpentine park. A garden account names the owner of that English estate as the second duke of Staffordshire. A monument to the first duke at Trentham was raised in 1834, designed with Barry’s advice and sculpted by Francis Chantrey.

Charles Barry was born in Bridge Street, Westminster, on 23 May 1795 and died on 12 May 1860. He was apprenticed at fifteen to the Lambeth surveyors Middleton and Bailey, and he showed drawings at the Royal Academy each year from 1812 to 1815. From 28 June 1817 to August 1820 he travelled through France, Italy, Greece, Egypt and the Levant, filling more than five hundred sketches. The Palazzo Farnese in Rome and the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence fixed his admiration for Italian architecture, and that taste later shaped the Italianate garden at Trentham and the formal geometry of the parterres below Dunrobin. He was the architect of the Palace of Westminster after the fire of 1834, with a Gothic design chosen in 1835, construction from 1840, the Lords chamber finished in 1847 and the Commons in 1852, and the work still unfinished at his death. He is also the architect associated with Dunrobin. The remodelling is dated from 1835 to 1850, and the castle is said to have been quadrupled in those years. He is also said to have been retained in 1845, to have been asked in 1845 for additions and for a royal suite for a visit by Queen Victoria, and to have designed the north front with William Leslie of Aberdeen between 1844 and 1848. Letters about the additions were written to George Taylor in 1845 and to William Leslie in 1851. The foundation stone was laid by Queen Victoria. William Leslie, later lord provost of Aberdeen, was a contractor on a large scale as well as a trained architect, and some accounts give the designs to him rather than to Barry. In the present state of knowledge it is not possible to say which of them was the architect. The style is Scottish Baronial, taken up among houses of that generation after Queen Victoria’s residence at Balmoral, and it also borrows from the French château, with conical spires. Externally there are elements in the manner of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, including the steep pyramidal roof over the main entrance. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was born in Paris on 27 January 1814 and died on 17 September 1879. He restored Notre-Dame in Paris, Saint-Denis, Mont Saint-Michel, the Sainte-Chapelle, the walls of Carcassonne and the château of Roquetaillade, and he wrote on the relationship of form and function. He did not build Dunrobin. The resemblance is in the roofs and the romantic turret.

The nineteenth-century work is tooled ashlar with polished dressings, a battered rubble plinth, and terrace walls to the south. The fourteenth-century tower and the stair tower are rubble. The seventeenth-century range is harled toward the court and rendered outside. The eighteenth-century wing is rendered. Stone for the 1835 to 1850 work came from the quarries at Brora and Braambury. The main entrance is a square tower of four stages on the north, with a round-headed porte-cochère, a pedimented and balconied window above, clasping turrets, and a corbelled turret with the pyramidal roof. The tallest tower, with the entrance, is 135 feet, or 41 metres, high. The round towers are 115 feet, or 35 metres, and the clock tower is 125 feet, or 38 metres. One clock tower has an ogee slated roof and a corbelled balcony with a cast-iron balustrade. The south front is set on three angles, with drum towers, conical fish-scale and ribbed lead roofs, and cast-iron finials. The staircase and the entrance hall are lined with Caen stone. The main stair is about 30 feet wide and 50 feet high, and it carries portraits of the Leveson-Gower family. A frieze in the entrance hall shows the arms of past earls. St John’s Well, in the courtyard of the oldest part, is one of the deepest draw wells in Scotland, at 92 feet, or 28 metres. It is also called a very deep pump well. No origin is known for the name.

The gardens were completed in 1850 and the essential layout is the same as it was around 1848, when a plan for a rose garden was drawn. Barry took the French formal manner of the Gardens of Versailles, and he had just finished the Italianate garden at Trentham. Each parterre is set around a circular pool with a fountain, and the beds narrow so that from above they seem longer than they are. The count of parterres is given as two and as three. The east walled garden is described with three parterres, each around a pool and a fountain. A fuller account puts a rose garden on the east, said to be laid out as a Scottish targe, or shield, with the central fountain as the spike, and two parterres on the west, each with a pond that once had a fountain. In 1874 the parterres were filled with violas and dahlias, and pampas grass had recently been introduced. The southern parterre later had its box edging removed and was being replanted. A croquet lawn, a grove of older sycamore and horse chestnut, a bamboo garden and a long herbaceous border along the north wall belong to the same garden. The Duchess Border, in its present form, dates from the 1920s. Gunnera manicata, with leaves of eight feet, grows at the foot of the steps. Fuchsias include a variety called Dunrobin Bedder, a pale shell-pink form, and the crimson and purple Riccartonii. Avenues of Tuscan laurel and whitebeam, pleached trees, clipped whitebeams, red hawthorns in tubs, and a potager with twenty wooden pyramids are later planting in the same plan. The whole landscaped area is 1,379 acres, or 558 hectares. In 1829 only eight acres of pasture were recorded against 615 acres of arable. By about 1870 the parks, roundels and new kitchen gardens west of the pier road were in place. The policy woods were extended toward Golspie, and Dunrobin Wood was planted on the slopes toward Uppat. Much of the outer ground has gone back to woodland. A gale in 1953 blew the policy woods, which were replanted with conifers. The pier gates were a gift from the Duke of Westminster in 1894. A monument to the second duke, of 1866, stands in the north avenue. The memorial to Duchess Harriet, of 1872, is a Gothic cross in the manner of the Eleanor crosses, enclosing a bronze bust by Noble. The private burial ground, of about 1920, may be by the later restorer, and it contains a statue brought from Trentham. The mid-eighteenth-century doocot has about five hundred nesting boxes and a potence. The dairy cottage of the mid-nineteenth century is a cottage ornée. An ice house of the late eighteenth century survives. A gardener’s cottage by the pier is dated 1740. The western half of the later kitchen garden was used for the school’s sports pitches in the 1960s, then as a market garden, and it was afterwards disused, with a eucryphia still growing in the north-east corner. Two palm trees in the castle’s food court, about twenty-five years old, were grown from seed taken from a palm at a hunting lodge of the duke of Sutherland on the northern coast.

Dunrobin Castle railway station, on the Far North Line between Golspie and Brora, was opened in 1870 as a private station for the castle. It was also opened to the public on 1 November 1870 and made private again on 19 June 1871. It closed on 29 November 1965 and reopened for summer trains on 30 June 1985. It is 86 miles and 22 chains from Inverness. The waiting room, in an Arts and Crafts manner, was designed by L. Bisset and built in 1902, and it is listed in category B. The castle account places that waiting room in 1902 without naming the designer. The platform was made long because the house might entertain three or four hundred guests. The building was compared to a Swiss chalet and was built of Scots pine. The station is open only while the castle is open, from the end of the winter closure into late October, with three trains each way on weekdays and Saturdays and one train toward Inverness on Sundays, and none before nine in the morning or after six in the evening. In May 2023 a press-and-ride button replaced the old practice of flagging the train by raising an arm. The third duke, who succeeded in 1861, had continued the roads and supported the northern railways, and he was called the largest landowner in western Europe. The fourth duke’s wife, Millicent, started a technical school for boys in Golspie. A sacrificial altar in the policies was presented to her in France.

Much of Barry’s interior was burned in 1915, when the house was in use as a naval hospital in the First World War, also called World War I. The fire was confined to the newer additions. An account of the grounds says the duchess was then running a field hospital in France. Eileen Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland, born Lady Eileen Gwladys Butler on 3 November 1891, married the future fifth duke on 11 April 1912 and was a Red Cross nurse in that war. She was Mistress of the Robes to Queen Mary from 1916 to 1921. She died on 24 August 1943, aged fifty-one, without children. The fifth duke married again on 1 July 1944, to Clare Josephine O’Brian, previously Dunkerly. The green and gold bedroom, in a French manner, was fitted in 1921 for her, with stippled green walls, gilt and mirrored panels, white marble chimneypieces, and a painted swag on the ceiling. George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 5th Duke of Sutherland, was born at Cliveden on 29 August 1888 and died on 1 February 1963, aged seventy-four, without legitimate issue. His death is also placed in 1966. He served in the Royal Naval Reserve in the First World War, commanded HMT Catania in 1914, and from 1915 to 1917 commanded a motor flotilla between Egypt and the Adriatic. He was Lord Lieutenant of Sutherland from 1913 to 1944.

Robert Lorimer repaired the house after the war. Sir Robert Stodart Lorimer was born in Edinburgh on 4 November 1864 and died on 13 September 1929. He worked for Robert Rowand Anderson and for George Frederick Bodley, opened his own practice in 1891, and became a leading architect of the Arts and Crafts movement and of the Scots baronial manner, with new houses at Ardkinglas and restorations such as Dunderave and Earlshall. At Dunrobin his work is dated 1919, 1920, and the years after 1915. He altered the tops of the main tower and the clock tower on the north side into a Scottish Renaissance form. The most notable external changes are to the two towers and several turrets. Inside, he kept surviving seventeenth- and eighteenth-century work, including wood carvings attributed to Grinling Gibbons. Grinling Gibbons was born in Rotterdam on 4 April 1648 and died on 3 August 1721. He was the king’s carver, working in limewood at Windsor, St Paul’s, Hampton Court and country houses, and he was found at his bench in Deptford in 1671 by John Evelyn. At Dunrobin the attribution covers carvings in the house generally, the swags above the green marble chimneypiece in the billiard room, and the overdoor and swags of the breakfast room. The billiard room was rebuilt by Lorimer from the library of 1850, with pine panelling, an ornate pilaster ceiling, and room for two tables. The dining room, 40 feet by 22 feet, was redesigned with a coffered plaster ceiling, a grisaille frieze of Italian origin, light wood panelling and a Tudor chimneypiece. The chairs contain needlework by the wife of the fifth duke. A Khorassan carpet lies in the room. The drawing room was made by Lorimer from two smaller rooms of the Barry wing. It looks over the garden and the sea, is lit by five full-length windows, and holds large paintings by Canaletto, eighteenth-century tapestries, and portraits by John Hoppner and Joshua Reynolds.

Canaletto was Giovanni Antonio Canal, born on 18 October 1697 and dead on 19 April 1768, a Venetian painter of city views who worked in England from 1746 to 1756. John Hoppner, born in Whitechapel on 4 April 1758 and dead on 23 January 1810, was a London portrait painter influenced by Joshua Reynolds, rival to Thomas Lawrence, and painter to the Prince of Wales. Joshua Reynolds was born at Plympton on 16 July 1723 and died on 23 February 1792. He was the first president of the Royal Academy and was knighted by George III in 1769. The library, of more than ten thousand books, was remade by Lorimer from a principal bedroom and dressing rooms, panelled and shelved in sycamore, with marble fireplaces at each end. It contains a portrait by Philip de László of Duchess Eileen and a mahogany table by Thomas Chippendale. Philip de László, born Fülöp Laub in Pest on 30 April 1869 and dead on 22 November 1937, became the leading society portrait painter in Europe after John Singer Sargent. Thomas Chippendale, born in June 1718 and buried on 16 November 1779, published his pattern book in 1754, and his name came to be used for furniture of that manner as well as for his own workshop. An aeolian orchestrelle, a pressure reed organ, stands in one of the hallways. The duke’s study is panelled in larch. The entrance stair has an ornamental Caen stone balustrade and a rib-vaulted landing.

When the fifth duke died, the earldom and the house passed to his niece, Elizabeth Sutherland, 24th Countess of Sutherland, and the dukedom, which could pass only to a man, passed to John Egerton, 6th Duke of Sutherland. John Egerton was born on 10 May 1915 and died on 21 September 2000. He had been fifth Earl of Ellesmere from 1944, and the castle account calls him Earl of Ellesmere. He did not inherit Dunrobin or the Sutherland estates. Those went to Elizabeth Janson, the niece. He was captured at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme in 1940 and spent four years as a prisoner. The garden inventory, written while he was alive, places him at Mertoun in the Borders. Elizabeth was born in 1921, became a ward of her uncle, and on his death succeeded as twenty-fourth countess and Lady Strathnaver. She inherited Dunrobin and dropped the double barrel of her surname so that she would be recognised as chief of Clan Sutherland. On 5 January 1946 she married the journalist Charles Noel Janson. She died on 9 December 2019, aged ninety-eight, at her London home, and her funeral was at Dornoch Cathedral on 21 December. Her elder son, Alistair Charles St Clair Sutherland, born on 7 January 1947, is the twenty-fifth earl and the present chief. Since 2022 the heir presumptive has been his elder daughter, Lady Rachel Elizabeth Sutherland, Mistress of Sutherland, after the death of his only son, Alexander Charles Robert Sutherland, Lord Strathnaver.

Between 1965 and 1972 the house was a boarding school for boys. It took forty boys and five teachers in its first year, and it is also described as a non-profit school for seven years from the late 1960s. An older survey of the fabric still describes the restored house as in use as a school. Since 1973 the house and grounds have been open to the public, with private rooms kept for the family, and a flat kept for the countess. In a local plan of July 1983 a five-year programme of essential repairs was to be undertaken by the Sutherland Trust. From 1984 to 1987 there was discussion of leasing part of the castle and some of the grounds to a Swiss holiday company. The family archives are no longer kept at the castle. They are held in Edinburgh.

The museum occupies the eighteenth-century summer house beside the formal garden, extended by the third duke, with a brick addition made when the building became a museum. It keeps the arrangement of the Victorian and early twentieth century. It shows trophy heads of animals shot by the family on safari, ethnographic objects from many places and particularly from Africa, geology, the gold panning at Kildonan, and the coal mine at Brora. Its archaeological collection includes more than twenty Pictish carved stones, mostly from east Sutherland, some of them found in the castle grounds, and cross-slabs whose devices were cut about fifteen hundred years ago. An inventory of the collection was made in 2019. A Golspie cross-slab with ogham, first noticed in the graveyard in 1856 and taken to the museum in 1868, was recorded there again on 22 May 2023. On 23 February 1977 David Low and Graham Park ploughed up a symbol stone in the Dairy Park, the raised beach between Golspie and the castle, named from the Victorian dairy at its north-east end. Joanna Close-Brooks excavated and found that the slab had lain over a low rectangular cairn covering a long cist. The cist held an adult woman, extended east-north-east to west-south-west, without grave goods. It was unpaved, cut into the gravel, about 2.3 metres long, 1.0 metre wide and 0.6 metres deep, and built of sandstone slabs whose capstones had partly fallen in. Clean yellow sand and a pebble layer covered it, with a rough kerb surviving on the north and west. The cairn was about 9.5 by 7 metres and about half a metre high, with no ditch. The stone is pink sea-smoothed sandstone, unworked, with pecked symbols on one face: a double crescent, a serpent and a Z-rod, and a mirror and comb. Its length is 1.20 metres and its thickness 0.15 metres. Its width is given as 1.05 metres and as 1.5 metres. Uncalibrated radiocarbon results from the skeleton were 660 plus or minus 50 years and 625 plus or minus 50 years. A further dating, published in 2017, gave 576 to 621 calibrated to one standard deviation. A discussion of the stone in 2022 returned to the woman and to the care taken over the grave, and placed her death around 660. The Dairy Park is a raised beach of sand and gravel, about 1,300 metres long and at most 160 metres wide, only five or six metres above the sea, with the ground rising inland to about 25 metres. The stone was found toward the east end of that strip. The symbols sit slightly off centre, clear of an uneven patch, and the punch marks are still visible, though the head of the serpent is worn. The symbol stone is in the castle museum. The human remains, and a sandstone side slab with criss-cross grooves, are in a national collection. A medieval corn-drying kiln was found in the same park. No excavation inside the castle walls has published a list of finds.

The castle was listed in category A on 18 March 1971. The garden pavilion and the walled garden are also in category A. The dairy cottage, the lodges and gate piers, the station, Golspie bridge, the stables, the mains, the kennels, the doocot, the monument to the second duke, the memorial to Harriet, and the private burial ground are in category B. The ice house is in category C. The designed landscape was added to the inventory of gardens on 1 July 1987, with the formal layout, the park and the woods judged of outstanding interest as a work of art, as history, as architecture and as scenery, of high interest for the old woods and the shore, and of some interest for the plants. A geological site of special scientific interest runs along the shore to the east. Falconry displays are given on the lawn by a resident falconer, with peregrine, gyrfalcon and Harris hawks among the birds, at half past eleven in the morning and half past two in the afternoon through the open season.

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