Dunrobin Castle: beyond the polished surface

Dunrobin Castle makes quite an impression, with its towers rising above the formal gardens and rooms full of portraits and furniture suggesting that everything is comfortably in its place. Yet in the Green and Gold Bedroom, I’ve watched the window frames deteriorate and seen damp appearing on walls along the visitor route. You can be admiring the contents of a room when your eye catches the condition of the building around them, and suddenly a castle that looked so permanent from outside begins to seem rather more vulnerable.

Visitors normally see just 18 of Dunrobin’s 189 rooms, leaving a considerable amount of castle to wonder about. A rare glimpse of the upper floors revealed former school dormitories still much as they had been when the school closed in 1972. Elsewhere there is private accommodation, and Dunrobin remains the Sutherland family seat, so the closed doors have different explanations. What they all conceal from the visitor is the scale of the job. The rooms we walk through are only a small part of the building that has to be kept standing, weatherproof and usable.

During the 1980s, finding a way to pay for it led to a proposal that would have changed Dunrobin considerably. Opening the castle was attracting about 33,000 visitors a year but reportedly losing around £13,000, and between 1984 and 1987 a scheme was considered to lease part of the castle and grounds to a Swiss holiday company. The proposed £7 million development would have brought the former school rooms back into use, alongside a holiday complex and a new ‘period village’ on the estate. The principal historic rooms were to be protected, but the people staying, working and moving around them would have given the place a very different life. The scheme never went ahead, leaving the question of how to support an enormous castle still to be answered.

Today, a charitable trust looks after Dunrobin and a trading company runs the visitor attraction, with annual income measured in millions. Even so, a Category A listed building of this size can absorb a great deal of money before a visitor notices any improvement. Beyond the immaculate formal gardens is another garden, enclosed by crumbling walls and becoming overgrown, with estate buildings whose roofs are failing. You won’t find yourself directed towards it, but seeing it makes the damp in the bedroom feel part of a much larger undertaking. A ticket lets us enjoy the rooms and gardens Dunrobin is ready to show us, while that neglected garden leaves me wondering how much work is waiting beyond the rest of the closed doors.

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