Inverness Castle

Inverness Castle occupies a commanding site that has carried a succession of strongholds since the eleventh century. Tradition credits Malcolm III with the earliest castle here, and the fortresses that followed were repeatedly caught up in the turbulence of Highland politics. Robert the Bruce razed its defences in 1307; in 1428 James I lured some fifty clan chiefs to a parley, then had a number of them seized and imprisoned. George Gordon, 4th Earl of Huntly, completed a towered castle in 1548, and in 1562 the Gordons barred Mary, Queen of Scots from entering until neighbouring clans drove them out and secured it for her. The site withstood repeated sieges through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the last in 1746. The red sandstone building seen today is largely the work of the architect William Burn, completed in 1836, with a north block added by Thomas Brown in 1848. For much of its modern life it housed the sheriff court and the county council; the courts moved out in 2020 and the castle closed in 2021 for a major refurbishment ahead of reopening as a visitor attraction. Its silhouette even appears on Royal Bank of Scotland fifty-pound notes.