Crathes Castle

Crathes sits on land given to the Burnett of Leys family by King Robert the Bruce in 1323. In the 14th and 15th centuries the Burnetts built a fortress of timbers on an island they made themselves in the middle of a nearby bog — a crannog, a method of fortification common in the Late Middle Ages.

Construction of the present tower house near Banchory, in the historic county of Kincardineshire, began in 1553, but was delayed several times by the political troubles of the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots. It was finally completed in 1596 by Alexander Burnett of Leys, with a further wing added in the 18th century. Alexander, with Crathes finished, promptly began another project — the early 17th-century reconstruction of nearby Muchalls Castle, which his son Sir Thomas Burnett completed.

The harled tower kept its Scottish renaissance interiors: original painted ceilings survive in several Jacobean rooms — the Chamber of the Muses, the Chamber of Nine Worthies and the Green Lady's Room — alongside a carved bed and two caquetoire chairs of 1597 bearing the owners' initials and heraldry.

In 1877 Sir Robert Burnett transformed the Great Hall with oak panelling and gilded leather in a faux-medieval style, to persuade his New York wife Matilda and her guests that they were living in a truly old structure, and bought a whole new suite of furnishings, antique and faux antique alike, as he thought befitted the house. His workmen spotted painted beam ceilings hidden under Georgian plasterwork, but covered them again; they were only re-exposed in 1913 during construction works. The Great Hall itself was stripped back to its bare stone walls in 1953.

After almost 400 years as the ancestral seat of the Burnetts of Leys, Sir James Burnett, 13th Baronet gave Crathes to the National Trust for Scotland in 1951, though the family continued to live in the house. On 6 January 1966 a fire damaged parts of the castle, the Queen Anne wing in particular. The laird, James Cecil Burnett, was left with only "a stump of the service wing" as his residence, and the quarters and possessions of the Trust's on-site representative, Miss Jean Dodds, were wholly destroyed.

The Trust's resident architect Schomberg Scott decided that the Queen Anne wing should be rebuilt to its original two storeys and the Victorian wing wholly demolished. The insurance paid £65,000, half of which built the Burnetts a new house detached from the castle.

Crathes turned out to hold something far older than the Burnetts. In 2004 excavations on the estate uncovered a series of pits believed to date from about 10,000 years ago, at a site called Warren Field, first identified when the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland spotted unusual crop marks in aerial photography. Analysis in 2013 concluded the pits are the world's oldest known lunar calendar, in use from about 8000 BC to 4000 BC — up to five thousand years older than the previously recorded time-measuring monuments of Mesopotamia.