Brodick Castle

Brodick Castle stands on the Isle of Arran in North Ayrshire, a red sandstone stronghold whose story runs from the wars of Scottish independence to the Victorian country house it became. In 1306 or 1307 James Douglas dislodged an English garrison here for Robert the Bruce, and the site was fought over for centuries after — damaged by English naval forces in 1406 and again in 1455 by John of Islay, Lord of the Isles. In the 1470s James III granted the lands to James Hamilton, 1st Lord Hamilton, beginning a long association with the Hamilton family, and by 1510 the Earl of Arran had rebuilt the castle as a tower house. During the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century the castle changed hands between Royalists and Covenanters, and Cromwell’s troops extended it with an artillery battery. Its greatest transformation came in 1844, when the architect James Gillespie Graham almost tripled the building’s size for the ducal family. The National Trust for Scotland acquired Brodick in 1958 from Lady Jean Fforde, accepted in lieu of death duties, and today the castle and its grounds — including a walled garden of 1710 — are open to visitors. The castle has appeared on Royal Bank of Scotland twenty-pound notes since 1972.