Abergeldie Castle

The name Abergeldie comes from the Pictish for 'confluence of Geldie', a reference to its position near where the River Geldie meets the Dee, and a late Bronze Age standing stone on the lawn, about six and a half feet high, is one indicator of how long the site has been occupied. The Gordon family acquired the lands in 1482, and Sir Alexander Gordon of Midmar, son of the first Earl of Huntly, most likely built the castle around 1550. It stayed in Gordon hands for 600 years, one of the longest unbroken records of ownership.

During the first Jacobite rising, Abergeldie was besieged by Jacobite forces in 1689–90. The siege was lifted after General Buchan's Jacobite troops were defeated by Sir Thomas Livingstone at Cromdale on 1 May 1690, when General Hugh Mackay of Scourie marched to the castle with cavalry and 1,400 Williamite Dutch infantry.

The castle was garrisoned again in the 1715 Jacobite Rising, this time by government troops, not long after Rachel Gordon, 10th Heiress, and her husband Captain Charles Gordon — who had also built the neighbouring house of Birkhall — had renovated it. In the short-lived rising of 1719 it was briefly garrisoned by Spanish troops.

Prince Albert bought a 40-year lease on the Abergeldie estate in 1848 for its closeness to the new royal residence at Balmoral. After his marriage in 1863, the Prince of Wales — 'Bertie', the future Edward VII — stayed at Abergeldie every year, shooting by day and playing cards by night; Gladstone's diary for 1871 records the prince asking him to drive over from Balmoral to dine, an evening that left Gladstone charmed by his manner but not his gaming morals.

The Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland records that the Duchess of Kent spent several autumns at the castle between 1850 and 1861, and that the Empress Eugénie passed the October of 1879 there, after the loss of her son the Prince Imperial. After Edward VII's accession in 1901, his son the Prince of Wales — later George V — used Abergeldie in 1902, and the king's daughters, Princesses Louise, Victoria and Maud, also stayed there.

The 21st Laird, John Seton Howard Gordon, had lived at Abergeldie since 1972 and was its last occupant. In January 2016, flood waters rising from the Dee washed away much of the land behind the castle, leaving the building on a precipice over the river and forcing the 76-year-old laird to flee. For a time the authorities were uncertain whether the castle could be saved if the flooding continued; a few days later structural engineers were confident that shoring work would prevent an imminent collapse.