Qualla: Gordon Castle

Gordon Castle: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anne Burgess, CC BY-SA 2.0. The south facade once ran 568 feet across the Moray plain, a single unbroken sweep of pale stone that the Dukes of Gordon could see from the Spey. Robert Burns came to dinner here. The Prince of Wales came to shoot. Thirty thousand people gathered on the lawns for the Highland Games. Then in the 1950s, a soldier-architect with a wartime nickname stood in front of the rotting central block and decided to take most of it down. What remains today, behind the surviving east wing and the medieval tower called the Bog o' Gight, is one of Scotland's strangest country house stories - a place that was too big to keep, too storied to lose, and just famous enough to come back.

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Image: Anne Burgess | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gordon Castle: The Cock o' the North

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christopher Gillan, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Gordons did not start here. They took their name from lands near Kelso in the Scottish Borders, and only worked their way north when Robert the Bruce, in 1296, rewarded Sir Adam Gordon with great swaths of Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, and Moray. By 1479, George Gordon, 2nd Earl...

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Image: Christopher Gillan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gordon Castle: Jane and the Long Facade

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anne Burgess, CC BY-SA 2.0. Alexander Gordon, 4th Duke of Gordon, held the dukedom for seventy-five years, a span long enough to remake a landscape. In 1769 he hired the Edinburgh architect John Baxter, who absorbed the medieval tower into a four-storey central block flanked by long wings - 173 metres of pa...

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Image: Anne Burgess | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gordon Castle: When the Big Houses Stopped Working

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anne Burgess, CC BY-SA 2.0. The First World War turned the castle into a hospital. Wounded Gordon Highlanders convalesced in rooms that had once held Edwardian shooting parties. Lord Bernard Gordon-Lennox died at the First Battle of Ypres in November 1914, aged 36. His son, Lord Settrington, was killed five...

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Image: Anne Burgess | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gordon Castle: What Geordie and Nan Decided

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anne Burgess, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the early 1950s Sir George Gordon-Lennox, known as Geordie, the son of the Lord Bernard who died at Ypres, bought the property back from the Crown. He and his wife Nan walked through the ruined central block and made a choice that still divides Scottish heritage opinion. They ...

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Image: Anne Burgess | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gordon Castle: What You See From the Air

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anne Burgess, CC BY-SA 2.0. From a few thousand feet, the cropped footprint of the demolished central block is still legible in the lawn. The surviving east wing reads as a discreet country house. The Walled Garden, one of the largest in Britain, is the green square that catches the light. The Spey winds no...

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Image: Anne Burgess | CC BY-SA 2.0