Craigievar Castle

Craigievar Castle in Aberdeenshire is one of the most celebrated and visually perfect castles in Scotland — a slender pink-harled tower house rising seven storeys from the Aberdeenshire hillside, topped with a fantasy of corbelled turrets, conical roofs, and carved stonework that has earned it the title of Scotland's fairy-tale castle. Completed in 1626 by William Forbes, a prosperous Aberdeen merchant who had made his fortune in the Baltic trade, Craigievar represents the pinnacle of the Scottish Baronial tower house tradition, achieved at precisely the moment when that tradition was at its most sophisticated and self-confident.

The castle is remarkable for the completeness of its survival. Unlike many great Scottish houses, Craigievar was never substantially altered or extended after its completion, and the building that visitors see today is almost exactly as Forbes left it in the early seventeenth century. The exterior, with its salmon-pink harl, its extravagant corbelling at every level, and its superb mastery of the transition from square tower base to complex roofline, has a coherence and beauty that is the product of a single sustained building campaign rather than centuries of accretion.

The interior is equally remarkable. The great hall retains its original decorative plasterwork ceiling of 1626 — a magnificent composition of heraldic devices, floral motifs, and portrait medallions — and the carved stone overmantel above the fireplace is one of the finest examples of Jacobean decorative stonework in Scotland. National Trust for Scotland has cared for the castle since 1963, and access is carefully managed through timed entry to preserve both the fabric and the intimate atmosphere of this extraordinary building.