Scotland’s castle country unfurls in the northeast, squarely in Aberdeenshire, where every dip in the pastoral landscape seems to hide a crumbling bastion or a decadent manse clinging to relevance and the faded glories of the past.
I’ve often pondered the strangeness of castles, or at least our perception of them — they appear as stout stone fortresses and populate our collective fantasies in much the same way, but this is like looking at a dinosaur skeleton and trying to puzzle out how this bone creature moved or ate or thought.
Castles looked a lot different at the height of their use. Considering the economic might of their owners, many of them would have been opulent and resplendent with rich tapestries, colorful painted ceilings, and plaster covering the castle’s stones. Even the intact castles of today, places like Fyvie Castle and Dunvegan Castle, are still missing some of their “skin” and “ligature.”
The topic of today’s post is a perfect example of this juxtaposition of opulence and ruin, of now and then. Tolquhon Castle (pronounced TOLL-kun) is one of Aberdeenshire’s lesser-known castles but one that instantly delights. These are my favorite castles to find, and perhaps you only find them in Aberdeenshire where the concentration of castles is so high that great structures are simply missed in the presence of more famous brethren.
Tolquhon Castle entered my perception thanks to the handy, crumbling road atlas I’ve kept with me for eight years. It appeared as just another teal icon near my journey north to Pennan. If there’s anything I’ve learned from more than a decade of traveling around Scotland, it’s that you always investigate, always assume something great lies upon your path.
Tolquhon Castle stands in a cluster of woods north of Aberdeen between Pitmedden and Tarves, accessible on a tiny branch shooting off from the B999. It’s a beautiful spot, especially on a sunny day like the one I enjoyed in May. The only other patrons I’d see on my visit were leaving as I entered the little gatehouse that serves as a Historic Scotland visitors’ centre.
I follow the neat track between green fields to the castle proper, a wonderful square-plan beast with the remnants of towers and a keep peering over the outer wall. Tolquhon Castle is remarkably well intact, but with the drapery of ruin that spikes flights of romanticism.
William Forbes, the 7th laird of the venerable Forbes family, built the current iteration of Tolquhon Castle between 1584-1589. These works, which included improved accommodations and updated gardens, were an addition and renovation of the earlier Preston’s Tower, a fortification built by Sir John Forbes and his wife, Marjorie Preston, in the 1420s.
A beautiful gatehouse sets the stage for the visit, and here you can spy the initials T.L. of master mason Thomas Leiper who contributed to Tolquhon Castle’s impressive facade in 1600. A vast courtyard opens inside the castle walls surrounded by a series of buildings, including Preston’s Tower replete with a great hall, bedchambers, and a cellar, a round tower for guests, the main house, William Forbes’s private residence with kitchen and great fireplace, and eastern and western ranges for a bakehouse, prison, library, and gallery.
The exterior of Tolquhon Castle is surrounded by a pleasance, a strollable parkland for the fashionable, and bee boles built into the western wall for hives. You’ll notice that while most of the buildings are in very good shape the roofs are almost entirely missing. This is common across Scotland because owners had to pay a kind of “roof tax” on buildings they owned. Castles are very expensive to maintain, so when hard financial times fell the owners of such places would regularly pull down the roof to divest themselves of the tax.
Wandering among Tolquhon Castle’s buildings you’ll spy several interesting details, like the hexagonal flagstones in the hall, massive fireplaces, and the statues on the gatehouse exterior. Tolquhon Castle was such an impressive manse in its day that King James VI visited just after William Forbes’s renovations.
The Forbes family sold Tolquhon Castle in the early 18th Century, though another William Forbes, the 11th laird, refused to leave and was forcibly dislodged by troops. Until the mid-19th Century Tolquhon Castle became little more than a farmhouse in dire need of repair. In 1929 it was finally transferred to state care and preservation.
Like so many of Scotland’s historic sites, the history of Tolquhon Castle certainly wends deeper than the records indicate. Along with Edzell Castle, Tolquhon Castle was one of my favorite finds on this journey through Angus and Aberdeenshire. I could’ve wandered these ruins for a lot longer than I did, but I didn’t want to be likened to the 11th Mr. Forbes and forcibly removed from the premises by the local constabulary.