The ideal of the Scottish castle: Aldourie's joyful fantasy of turrets, invention and recreation

Over past decade, a series of architectural projects has transformed the castle and estate of Aldourie on the southern shore of Loch Ness. The work, which includes several new buildings, has been undertaken in an unusual spirit by Ptolemy Dean Architects. Projects of this kind tend to divide between those that strive either for archaeological accuracy or strident modernity. Either approach can be very successful, but it’s refreshing to find something that borrows from both, combining the sympathetic repair of inherited fabric with free, but informed historical borrowing, re-creation and invention. The result is not a pragmatic third way, but something possessed of a playful integrity of its own.

In its present form, Aldourie answers the popular ideal of a Scottish castle with a fantastical outline of battlements, turrets and towers. As was explained by Mary Miers in a Country Life article of January 26, 2011, the present building has a deep history, but was substantially the creation of several generations of the Fraser-Tytler family. They acquired the property by marriage in 1776, at which time the house was a simple two-storey block with an attached stair turret. This property was modestly enlarged in 1839, probably with the involvement of the architect William Burn, but it was from 1853, following the inheritance of Capt William Fraser-Tytler, that it approached its present scale and ambition.

The captain, a bachelor, served as a quartermaster general in the Indian army and was an accomplished draftsman and surveyor. He enlivened the existing building with Scottish baronial detailing in two major rounds of alterations. The first of these was completed in 1854 by the architectural partnership Mackenzie and Matthews of Elgin. This was followed by further changes, for which, confusingly, two sets of drawings survive, one by David Bryce dated 1861 and another by an architectural partnership involving a pupil-turned-rival of Bryce, Charles Kinnear. In the event, however, it seems that, in 1863–64, James Matthews (of Mackenzie and Matthews) and William Lawrie, his Inverness-based partner, executed changes cherry-picked from both sets of proposals. Later, in the 1880s, a conservatory suggested by Bryce was also constructed.

These changes to the house were accompanied by improvements to the estate. On April 7, 1854, The Inverness Courier noted that most of the cottages and steading on the estate had been pulled down and rebuilt and, five years later, on March 31, 1859, the paper described a demonstration of a new steam-threshing machine on the estate to ‘fifty gentlemen’. The unsightly chimney, the report notes, was designed in the form of an obelisk and smeared in ‘coal tar’ to prevent it being an eyesore. It makes clear that a new garden had been planted, the holly hedges growing rapidly in the exceptionally mild climate created by the loch. Wider plantings of specimen trees were also made at this time.

The next important round of changes to the castle followed in 1902–03, overseen by Robert Lorimer, who remodelled the wing that flanks the entrance front and reconfigured the kitchen and service rooms. The last in the male line of the Fraser-Tytler family to inherit the estate died in 1937 and, following the death of his widow in 1948, the property was bought by a nephew, Lt-Col Angus Cameron. His family put Aldourie on the market in 2002 and it was eventually bought by Roger Tempest, owner of Broughton Hall, North Yorkshire, and the founder of Rural Solutions.

His extensive work to the estate and house was recorded by Country Life just before it garnered a Historic Houses Award in 2011. Mr Tempest sold Aldourie in 2014 to the Danish couple Anders and Anne Povlsen, who have overseen the most recent renewal of this remarkable property.

Mr Dean initially became involved at Aldourie as part of a project undertaken by Tom Stuart-Smith to create a walled garden on the property in place of an orchard. This was itself part of a wider brief to rejuvenate the parkland and the setting of the castle, including a formal garden (Country Life, September 13, 2023). Mr Dean offered advice about the garden wall and designed a new pavilion for it, before turning his attention to the existing estate buildings, many of which were in a poor condition. ‘We were there to restore the landscape,’ he explains, ‘and, by making the buildings in the spirit of the originals, it was possible to knit it all together. In a sense, all our buildings are props to this landscape and the magnificent scenery of Loch Ness. We also aimed to have a bit of fun.’

One important task was the restoration of the steading, a short distance to the south of the castle. To enable this work to go ahead and to create space for estate vehicles, a new Home Farm was first created immediately beside it. The Home Farm details, such as the swept masonry angles of the ranges and the high-quality timber framing executed by Carpenter Oak, Kirriemuir, were observed from other local buildings. The latter, for example, with its profusion of long pegs, was inspired by work at Arisaig, Inverness-shire, the only Scottish country house of the Arts-and-Crafts architect Philip Webb. Use was made of salvaged materials: the roofs were covered with Ballachulish slates and the courtyard laid with cobbles taken up for the tramlines in the streets of Edinburgh. The contractor for this and all subsequent work was the Inverness firm Kishorn Heritage.

With the new steading complete, attention turned to the steading itself, which now offers a combination of events space and accommodation. Where possible, all the original fixtures of this building were preserved, lending character to the interior. A great deal, however, including large internal areas of larch-board panelling, had to be remade. There were interventions to facilitate circulation and additions to the buildings, as well as the inclusion of three arches cut into the fabric from a demolished steading at Garve, Ross-shire, to the north of Inverness (Fig 8). These are made in local Tarradale stone, which is no longer quarried.

Next to the steading and Home Farm were other decaying and utilitarian buildings, including a log store ruggedly constructed out of split tree trunks and covered in corrugated iron. Rather than replace this building, the racks for wood within it have been designed to reinforce the structure and it continues to serve its original purpose.

The materials of the store — which constitute a 20th-century vernacular in the Highlands — also suggested an architectural idiom for the neighbouring buildings needed to house a biomass district heating system (Fig 6). This takes the form of a primitive hut with tree-trunk columns after the manner of that postulated by abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier in the 1750s (Fig 5).

As work progressed to these buildings, the castle and its surrounds also became the object of alteration. A new kitchen and boot room was added in place of an earlier boot room and service yard and the 1880s conservatory — which had been demolished in the 1950s, leaving only the foundations in place — was reinstated. As designed by Mr Dean, both additions assumed the outward form of Lorimer’s work, with parapets articulated by low, broad battlements. The conservatory was ornamented externally with stone thistle heads, a decorative leitmotif taken from a 19th-century dormer window on the castle. It appears in stone and timber throughout the new works at Aldourie.

The idea of the thistles on the conservatory parapet comes from an unexpected source: an installation in 2007 across London’s South Bank by Sir Antony Gormley of repeated sculptures of his own body. Seeing these figures breaking up the horizontal lines of the National Theatre, Mr Dean realised how they animated the parapets of that Brutalist building, lending them depth and interest. Curiously, the glazed doors of the conservatory are actually architectural salvage from the original building, which were discovered stashed away in a cellar.

During work to the gardens, the foundations of a lost outbuilding were discovered just to the north of the castle and the decision was taken to reinstate the structure. Mr Dean, a railway enthusiast, playfully conceived a replacement on the existing footprint in the idiom of a Highland station. He also spanned the deep burn immediately beside it with a new footbridge. Inspired by the 1880–81 pedestrian bridge across the River Ness at Inverness, this is a suspension bridge with Gothic detailing (Fig 2). It was constructed by Beaver Bridges of Shrewsbury in Shropshire.

As a final cosmetic change to the castle, which, in 2014, was a patchwork of different finishes, it was also decided to re-harl the exterior (Fig 3). A fragment of historic harling from the building was sent off for analysis to the Scottish Lime Centre Trust and its composition, including colouring with ochre and copperas, reproduced. The renewal of the harling has bestowed a fresh coherence on the castle and gives it a new prominence within the wider landscape.

Slightly further afield, on the shore of Loch Ness to the north of the castle, a new boathouse has also been created. The distinctive, bell-shaped roof is again a free borrowing from the Arts-and-Crafts work of Lorimer. It is constructed in oak frame on a foundation of Staffordshire blue brick and Scottish Whinstone. On the first floor, approached up an elegant stair (Fig 4), is a magnificent interior open to the roof that enjoys wide views from a balcony across the loch (Fig 1). The cladding internally and externally is respectively of Douglas fir and larch, whereas the roof is of reclaimed Ballachulish slate.

Before these recent changes, Aldourie never possessed a gate lodge, although plans for one designed by Bryce do survive. Mr Dean has, therefore, created a new lodge in the spirit of this unrealised building (Fig 7). The planning application for this was submitted on the eve of the covid lockdown, a reminder of the difficult circumstances in which parts of this renewal project were undertaken. Once again, the design makes use of salvaged material including a bow window and stone from a demolished 19th-century farmhouse from Stratton, Inverness-shire. The gateposts next to the building are crowned by signature masonry thistles.

The architectural renewal of Aldourie richly merits the awards it has recently garnered from both the Georgian Group and the Traditional Architecture Group. Apart from the quality of the workmanship, it reflects a refreshing freedom of approach and eclecticism. Its success begs some important questions. Why have we allowed such deep divisions to be established between contemporary and historic architectural design? What is it precisely that at once offends one group of people with designing in an idiom borrowed from the historic past and horrifies another by straying from precedent? Perhaps it is because we forget that at root — and apart from all its other important qualities — architecture is not really about philosophy, but delight. It is a lesson that Aldourie teaches by example.

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