Blair Castle

Blair Castle stands amid the wooded straths of highland Perthshire, near Killiecrankie, and has served for centuries as the seat of Clan Murray, the Earls and later Dukes of Atholl. Building work is said to have begun in 1269, and the oldest surviving portion, the six-storey Comyn’s Tower, still anchors a structure enlarged repeatedly through the medieval period and beyond. Its whitewashed, turreted silhouette owes much to the 1870s, when David Bryce recast the whole building in the Scots Baronial manner; a ballroom wing followed in 1885. The castle sat close to the fault lines of Scottish history. In 1689 Viscount Dundee relieved it shortly before the nearby Battle of Killiecrankie, and during the rising of 1745-46 it was held by Jacobite forces and afterwards besieged. A gentler chapter came in 1844, when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert stayed here, an occasion that led the Duke to be granted the Atholl Highlanders, still described as the only legal private army in Europe. Inside, the rooms display arms and armour, family portraits, and a set of Mortlake tapestries once owned by Charles I, alongside fine plaster ceilings that reward a slow walk through the state apartments.