Qualla: Torosay Castle

Torosay Castle: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Allister Combe, CC BY-SA 2.0. In July 2008, someone opened a dark wooden sideboard at Torosay Castle and pulled out a bottle that had been locked inside it for at least 111 years. The label read Veuve Clicquot, 1893. The cork was sound, the contents in mint condition. At the time of its discovery it was the oldest known bottle of Clicquot champagne in existence. It is now considered priceless and lives behind glass at the Veuve Clicquot visitor centre in Reims, France. Whoever shut that sideboard door in the 1890s never came back to open it.

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Image: Allister Combe | CC BY-SA 2.0

Torosay Castle: David Bryce's Scottish Baronial Vision

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philippe Giabbanelli, CC BY-SA 3.0. The castle was not, originally, a castle at all. A modest Georgian house stood on the site in the early nineteenth century, owned by Colonel John Campbell of Possil. In the 1850s the Colonel's son, also named John, inherited the estate and decided the existing building was insuff...

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Image: Philippe Giabbanelli | CC BY-SA 3.0

Torosay Castle: Italian Statues as Ballast

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philippe Giabbanelli, CC BY-SA 3.0. The grounds at Torosay are arguably more famous than the house. Walter Murray Guthrie, the estate's owner around the turn of the twentieth century, learned that an abandoned garden near Milan was being broken up. He bought nineteen marble statues in the style of the Italian sculp...

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Image: Philippe Giabbanelli | CC BY-SA 3.0

Torosay Castle: Closed Doors, Open Gardens

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Traveler100, CC BY-SA 3.0. For decades the castle was open to the public, linked to the Craignure ferry terminal by the narrow-gauge Isle of Mull Railway. That arrangement ended in 2012, when Christopher Guthrie-James - the fifth laird and last of his line at Torosay - sold the property. He spoke of relief...

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Image: Traveler100 | CC BY-SA 3.0