Gordon Castle

The Gordons took their name from lands near Kelso in the Scottish Borders in the 12th century. Sir Adam Gordon gained royal favour under Robert the Bruce, who granted him extensive territories in Aberdeenshire, Banffshire and Moray, including the Forest of Enzie, and his descendants rose to become Lords of Gordon and then Earls of Huntly, one of the most powerful families in northern Scotland. In 1479 George Gordon, 2nd Earl of Huntly, began a new stronghold in the Forest of Enzie known as the Bog o' Gight — "Windy Bog" — a six-storey tower house that became the family's northern seat.

The 4th Earl remodelled the tower into a Renaissance Z-plan mansion, recorded in John Slezer's 1672 engraving and praised by Richard Franck for its "lofty and majestic towers and turrets that storm the air". An inventory of November 1648 lists lavish beds, a hen house and a parrot cage in the long gallery.

The Gordons remained one of the few great families loyal to the Roman Catholic faith through the Reformation. On 5 August 1594 the Jesuit Father James Gordon was at the Bog of Gight, receipting payments from the Papal treasury to the rebel Catholic Earls of Huntly, Errol and Angus. George Gordon, 4th Marquess of Huntly, was raised to 1st Duke of Gordon by Charles II and became a prominent Jacobite after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. His descendants gradually aligned with the Protestant Crown, particularly after the rising of 1745, when the widowed Henrietta Mordaunt, Duchess of Gordon, publicly brought her children to the parish church, marking the family's reconciliation with Hanoverian rule.

The 2nd Duke greatly enlarged the medieval tower's footprint in the 1720s, but the transformation came under Alexander Gordon, 4th Duke, who held the title for seventy-five years. A 1764 scheme by John Adam and the Huguenot architect Abraham Roumieu came to nothing; instead the Edinburgh architect John Baxter began rebuilding in 1769, folding the six-storey Bog o' Gight tower into a four-storey central block flanked by two-storey pavilions, with a south facade extending nearly 173 metres. The 4th Duke also laid out the planned village of Fochabers and built the great Walled Garden of 1803–04, one of the largest in Scotland, on the site of the old village it replaced. After fire destroyed the east wing, the Aberdeen architect Archibald Simpson was commissioned to redesign it in 1827.

The 4th Duke's duchess, Jane Maxwell, made the castle a centre of Highland culture and fashionable society; Robert Burns composed the poem "Castle Gordon" in gratitude for their hospitality. Their son the 5th Duke raised the regiment that became the Gordon Highlanders and, with his father, is credited with legalising whisky production for their tenant George Smith of Glenlivet. He died without heirs in 1836 and the dukedom became extinct.

The estates passed to the 5th Duke's nephew Charles Lennox, 5th Duke of Richmond, whose principal seat was Goodwood House in Sussex; he added Gordon to his name, founding the Gordon-Lennox line. Under the 6th and 7th Dukes of Richmond and Gordon, from 1860 to 1928, the castle became a centre of late-Victorian and Edwardian society. The Prince of Wales, later King George V, was a frequent guest, and the Gordon Castle Highland Games drew crowds of up to thirty thousand.

The First World War turned the castle into a military hospital treating wounded Gordon Highlanders. Lord Bernard Gordon-Lennox, son of the 7th Duke, was killed at the First Battle of Ypres in November 1914, aged 36, and the Duke's grandson Lord Settrington died in action in Russia in 1919. Double death duties after the 8th Duke's premature death forced the 9th Duke to sell most of the castle's contents in 1937 and surrender the castle and grounds to the Crown Estate in 1938.

Troops occupied the house through the Second World War, and by the late 1940s the central block was riddled with dry rot and damp. In the early 1950s Sir George Gordon-Lennox, son of Lord Bernard, bought the property back from the Crown and demolished the ruined central block, converting the east wing and the medieval tower into a family home. Since 2008 Angus and Zara Gordon Lennox have restored the Walled Garden with the designer Arne Maynard as a productive visitor attraction.