Secrets of Charles and Camilla’s home, sweet home
As the Duke and Duchess in of Rothesay self-isolate really is Scotland, why there rather be nowhere they would crisis forced to sit out the
AFEW winters ago, the Prince of Wales woke to find his garden at Birkhall, on Royal Deeside, under water and the botanic restoration project to which he had dedicated countless hours in ruins.
Much like the Blitz had proved decades earlier, when Buckingham Palace was struck by the Luftwaffe, the Aberdeenshire floods of 2016 were the great royal leveller.
As Charles and Camilla waded around the nearby village of Ballater in their wellies, they met householders and business owners shaking their heads in despair as they bailed out sodden interiors with mops and buckets.
For once, the heir to the throne could do more than sympathise; he could share; he could even be a neighbour.
Yes, he told one trader, Birkhall had been hit too – the gardens were ‘devastated’. He promised to do whatever he could to help his fellow flood victims.
Four years on, another crisis and another royal leveller. Prince Charles, in common with thousands of his mother’s subjects around the UK, had tested positive for coronavirus.
He and the Duchess of Cornwall, in the words of their Clarence House spokesman, were ‘selfisolating at home in Scotland’.
In the context of a statement confirming the 71-year-old Prince had the disease which is ravaging humanity across the planet, the choice of words may not detain the reader at first glance. But they are highly significant all the same.
For they establish as fact something Charles has been hinting at for years. Birkhall is home.
tHIS overgrown cottage on three floors with its ivory-coloured walls, memorial gazebo to the Queen Mother and Wendy house built for her daughters Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in childhood, is where Charles and Camilla actually live.
That the heir to the throne had to self-isolate in his beloved Birkhall, the closest thing to domestic normality he has ever known, would have been no small consolation.
Indeed, from Charles’s earliest days of visiting this Deeside sanctuary, seven-and-a-half miles from the more stately Balmoral Castle belonging to the Queen, consolation has been a primary function of the place. It was here that Charles and later his brother Andrew used to come on breaks from Gordonstoun school in Moray.
Famously, the elder son was no great admirer of the school’s tough regimen and the days spent with his grandmother in her Deeside home were welcome respite.
It was here, too, in Birkhall’s splendid isolation, that Charles withdrew to mourn the Queen Mother’s death in 2002.
She knew how he loved the place and ensured he would inherit it on her passing.
How ironic that, almost two decades on, the isolation he has so long enjoyed here should be on doctor’s orders and that, this time, it involved separation even from his wife – who tested negative for the virus.
It was at Birkhall that the pair announced their engagement and, indeed, posed for photographs to commemorate the occasion.
Here is where they honeymooned after their wedding in April 2005, where they have returned for extended stays every summer since and where they retreat as their schedules allow.
And here is where the Duke of Rothesay, as he is known when in Scotland, regularly feeds the neartame red squirrels which appear daily at the back door. Well, as patron of the Red Squirrel Survival Trust, what else is one to do?
As the Prince once explained: ‘They come into the house at Birkhall and we get them chasing each other round and round inside.
‘If I sit quietly, they will do so around me. Sometimes, when I leave my jackets on a chair with
nuts in the pockets, I see them with their tails sticking out, as they hunt for nuts. They are incredibly special creatures.’
Then there is perhaps the surest sign of all that Charles considers this place home: he gets his daily newspapers here – foremost among them the Scottish Daily Mail and the Aberdeen-based Press and Journal.
Though the house has never been open to the public, there are, say visitors, reminders of its previous owner everywhere.
Indeed, when the Queen’s first cousin Margaret Rhodes, a former woman of the bedchamber to the Queen Mother, last visited Birkhall a few years before her death in 2016, she was surprised to find just how much remained unchanged. She wrote: ‘I got quite a jolt when I saw several of her blue raincoats in the hall, long after her death in March 2002. ‘Still hanging there even though Birkhall, which is part of the Balmoral estate, has subsequently been taken on by her grandson Prince Charles and his wife Camilla … they prompted a flood of memories about our windy walks and rainswept picnics in the surrounding countryside.’
LIKEWISE the Queen Mother’s collection of Vanity Fair ‘Spy’ cartoons still line the wall of one staircase and a downstairs loo is still known as Arthur’s Seat in tribute to Her Majesty’s former treasurer. In the quiet of the big
L-shaped house, the royal selfisolator may have looked back fondly on more boisterous times in his Aberdeenshire abode.
It is unlikely, however, that any event he hosted there quite matched the rumbustiousness of his grandmother’s.
Dinner at Birkhall, remembered the Queen Mother’s niece Mrs Rhodes, could be an uproarious affair.
‘At the end of the meal she would start a series of toasts. As well as
“Hooray for …” with glasses held high, there was even more of “Down with…” with glasses almost disappearing beneath the table.
‘The toasts, combined with the nostalgic sing-songs, always made for an unforgettable evening.’
The house, which dates back to 1715, would have been rather less fun-filled as the Prince, determined to keep working through his illness, ploughed through paperwork rendered nowadays in digital form rather than in the green boxes he once received.
It is unclear how much contact, if any, has been possible with the villagers of Ballater just along the road from his wooden front gate discreetly patrolled by a police officer.
But their thoughts, he can be assured, are with their royal neighbour. The Rev David Barr, minister at Glenmuick Parish Church in the centre of Ballater, said: ‘We wish the Duke and Duchess of
Rothesay all the best, and send our love. They do an awful lot for the village.’
Meanwhile, John Sinclair, chairman of the Ballater Highland Games and co-owner of the Royal Warrant-holding HM Sheridan butcher in the village, said: ‘He’s a major figure in Deeside and has helped a lot with things in the village.
‘He has been in our shop a fair few times over the years and is certainly a fan. He’s extremely supportive and I wish him, and all others with a coronavirus diagnosis, a speedy recovery.’
It was in 1852 that Birkhall first fell into royal hands. Four years earlier Prince Albert had taken the lease on the 50,000acre Balmoral estate. Work on a new castle began after the royals secured the freehold for the estate and bought the neighbouring Birkhall too.
This smaller pile was gifted to Edward, Prince of Wales, but he visited it only once, finding the accommodation at nearby Abergeldie Castle more his style. In 1884, Queen Victoria bought back Birkhall for the accommodation of other Royal Family members and staff.
Its was not until the 1930s that the place was seen as anything more than overspill for the castle. The Queen’s grandfather George V loaned the house to her parents, the then Duke and Duchess of York, who lavished it with much-needed attention. They redecorated the place throughout, built a new wing, replanted the extensive sloping gardens and built the Wendy house where their daughters – and all subsequent royal children – have played.
The couple, it is said, were rarely happier than when in their garden at Birkhall.
The abdication crisis of 1936, however, ensured their tenure at Birkhall was short-lived. On the Duke’s accession to the throne as George VI, the King and Queen moved to the ‘big house’ at Balmoral.
NOT until after the King’s death in 1952 did the Queen Mother return to the more modest accommodation and, once again, throw herself into redecoration and upgrading.
It was in the years that followed that her grandson came to know and love Birkhall. Less grandiose than the baronial-style castle completed in 1856, this was a Jacobean hunting lodge – albeit with 14 bedrooms – and had more homely interiors.
Though the property remains steadfastly a private one, a rare exception was made in the case of a BBC documentary marking the
Prince’s 70th birthday. In one scene he was interviewed in a reception room in Birkhall festooned with personal mementos.
One framed photo on a dresser appeared to have been taken at Prince Louis’s christening, while another showed the Queen with Princes William and Harry during their youth.
ON a wooden coffee table stood a vase with vibrant wildflowers, while a butterfly palm plant sat in a blue and white ceramic planter next to the window.
If details about the inside of Birkhall remain scant, however, the same can hardly be said of the extensive gardens which the Prince will surely look out on with great pride.
Among his first projects was the commissioning of a large octagonal two-storey gazebo built from granite in a traditional Scottish 18th-century design by architect Lachlan Stewart.
Dedicated to a much loved grandmother, the structure has a sitting room above and a store below.
As for the gardens themselves, Charles was so pleased with progress there that in 2013 he agreed to guest edit an edition of Country Life in which they would be shown off.
He said at the time: ‘It is such a special place, particularly because it was made by my grandmother. It is a childhood garden, and all I’ve done, really, is enhance it a bit.’
Photographs from the Queen Mother’s tenure decades earlier proved the Prince was being typically modest.
He admitted there had been ‘endless disappointments’, but notable successes too. Blue poppies positively thrived there, along with Primula florindae brought down from the Queen Mother’s Caithness residence the Castle of Mey.
As the article noted, ‘they jostle for space with honeysuckle and hostas, Japanese maples and other woodlanders. The Prince is a dense planter; there is little or no bare earth on view.’
Alas, in 2016, much of the fruits of 14 years of labour in the garden was largely lost in the floods, ushering in yet more years of effort.
The Prince appears to have made a good recovery from his illness, but for the country as a whole the virus is not yet beaten.
Yet when that battle is won and it is safe to return outdoors, Charles and Camilla will walk down to Ballater again to see how the villagers have been handling the crisis.
It is what neighbours do. j.brocklebank@dailymail.co.uk