A new dawn for Royal honeymoon hideaway?
From its spectacular Highlands setting to its royal romance, Taymouth Castle has an extraordinary history. But this neo-Gothic masterpiece has lain empty for nearly 40 years — the star-studded schemes to revive it as doomed as the ghosts said to haunt it. Until now...
ON A clear September day in 1842, Queen Victoria and her new husband stepped out of a carriage on a Perthshire estate and into abject luxury. The newly remodelled Taymouth Castle gleamed in the autumn sunshine as its guns fired a royal salute, while 200 traditionally armed Highland guards, and the castle’s owner, John Campbell, the 2nd Marquess of Breadalbane, advanced to receive them.
Inside, freshly completed murals and spectacular renaissance woodwork caught the Queen’s eye as she was shown to her lavish quarters, before dining on a sumptuous feast of ox, ptarmigan, capercaillie and roe deer.
Later that evening, much to the delight of the young Queen who was, after all, on her honeymoon, 50,000 coloured lamps were lit outside on a slope spelling the words ‘Welcome Victoria and Albert’.
Yet today this grandest of Scottish castles lies empty, its corridors and halls gathering dust and stalked only, so it is said, by its resident ghosts, the green lady and a little Indian prince. Despite being one of the greatest examples of neo-Gothic architecture in Britain, Taymouth has lain silent since 1982.
All that, however, may be about to change. A project has been submitted to Perth and Kinross Council which seeks to turn Taymouth, or part of it at least, back into a luxury bolthole fit for a Queen.
The tale of Taymouth Castle, which stretches back to the 16th century, is one as deep and murky as the nearby waters of Loch Tay.
Since playing host to Queen Victoria’s honeymoon almost 180 years ago, there have been links with Madonna, Colonel Gaddafi, Cher and Scots businessman Scot Young, whose gruesome death in 2014 was rumoured to be connected to the Russian mafia.
Over the past century Taymouth Castle has operated as a hotel, a boarding school for the children of US servicemen, a wartime hospital and, improbably, a drama school offering diplomas in puppetry.
But since 1982 it has been shuttered, initially falling into disrepair before hosting a succession of ambitious and ill-fated projects to restore it to its former glory.
Now, in the latest chapter of Taymouth’s history, an application has been lodged on behalf of its new owners, a little-known US firm called Discovery Land Company (DLC), to turn one wing of the castle into a VIP suite for ‘high-worth individuals around the globe’.
The Breadalbane suite, which was extensively redesigned in anticipation of Queen Victoria’s visit in 1842, has fallen into disrepair in recent years.
This application, submitted to Perth and Kinross Council by architects McKenzie Strickland Associates, envisions a bold plan to turn it into a retreat for the super-rich.
‘The proposed alterations will... deliver an additional exclusive accommodation suite considered vital to attract investment and help deliver the successful phased restoration and revitalisation of the castle, and help realise the ultimate vision for Taymouth,’ reads the proposal.
That ‘ultimate vision’ for this fairy tale castle is a dream many have chased over the years.
But like so many fairy tales, it has often gone sour.
The Taymouth Castle which stands today was constructed in the 1830s, much of its remodelling done in anticipation of the Queen’s visit, but there has been a castle on the site since the 16th century, when it was originally built as Balloch Castle in 1552 for Sir Colin Campbell, the Laird of Glenorchy.
At its peak the estate spanned a massive 400,000 acres, until John Campbell, father of the Marquis who hosted the Queen, knocked it down and built the neo-Gothic Taymouth in its place.
It was Taymouth which inspired the Queen to buy Balmoral and sparked her love for the Highlands. She returned to its battlements in 1866, by then a widow, to fondly recall her days as a young bride.
But by the 20th century the fortunes of the Campbell family were fading (fuelled, in some part, by the gambling habits of one marchioness) and by the 1920s they had sold it to a Glasgowbased consortium led by the rich, newly moneyed McTaggart family, who had made their cash in the building trade.
They promptly opened it as a then-fashionable hydro hotel, installing elevators and building a golf course. But while it attracted high-end visitors – in 1927 the hotel was visited by, among others, Prince and Princess Gin Ri of Korea – it never truly made a profit and by the 1930s had closed.
There then followed 50 years in which it operated as a wartime hospital, a boarding school and, briefly, a drama school, until it closed its doors for good in 1982.
In the 1990s the McTaggart family put Taymouth on the market and rumours swirled that Madonna, newly in love with all things British,
was interested. Indeed, it was said it was only that she could not close the accompanying golf course to the public which swayed her against the purchase.
Cher, too, was said to be interested but ultimately backed away, and although the McTaggarts struggled to find a buyer they received the most magnificent advertising when Taymouth was used as a stand-in for Balmoral in the Oscar-nominated movie Mrs Brown, starring Dame Judi Dench and Billy Connolly.
But the building was slowly decaying, submitting to damp and rot, so much so that by 2000 even Historic Scotland refused to step in to help, feeling the costs of restoration would be too high.
It was not until 2005 that it was sold for £12million to a consortium who disclosed grand plans to turn
it into the country’s first six-star hotel, a project already approved by Perth and Kinross Council.
The consortium, made up of a group of British businessmen linked to the firm Hotels International, envisaged a luxury castle unlike anything ever before seen in Scotland, with marble bathrooms, Italian silks, presidential suites and a restaurant serving the very best in high-end Scottish cuisine.
It was to be Scotland’s Burj Al Arab, the famed hotel in Dubai, and adept at attracting the sort of clientele who travel by private plane and helicopter and only ever stay at the finest resorts.
The plan was to redevelop Taymouth then turn it over to hotel operator the Four Seasons to launch it onto the global stage.
The project designer, Peter Inston, who had built a palace for the Emir of Qatar and a castle in Ireland for the dancer Michael Flatley, claimed that by the time he was finished, Taymouth would ‘make Gleneagles look like a Salvation Army hostel’.
Bold claims indeed. There were also plans for 60 lodges in the grounds and 20 timeshare villas.
But the project received a blow when the Four Seasons dropped out, while investors came and went, leaving the castle in a financial black hole.
There were tales of rich Arabs arriving in blacked-out cars to view the property, and restoration work continually stalled.
The lodges never materialised, and although some renovation was done, enough to save the castle from falling into permanent disrepair, it was not extensive enough to fully open its doors again, either privately or publicly, save for a few weddings.
Financially, the trail quickly became obscured. After 2008 the castle passed through a number of hands via murky, offshore companies, and by 2018 was believed to be owned by Ali Ibrahim Dabaiba, the former chief of development for Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Dabaiba was alleged to have invested funds that the Libyan authorities claimed were stolen into a number of Scottish properties, including Taymouth. Following
a tax probe into the company behind the purchase, Companies House removed the firm’s listing and forced it into dissolution.
Taymouth was again left to rot, while its ownership was once more up for the bidding.
A year later, the new owners broke cover when a lawyer was jailed for 14 months for contempt of court over a dispute over millions of pounds of client funds intended to be used to buy the castle.
London-based lawyer Stephen Jones was sued by DLC, which hired him and his law firm Jirehouse to front the purchase of the castle.
More than £11.5million was wired into an account controlled by Jirehouse in April 2018, then a further £7.6million in December.
However, unbeknown to DLC, the money was loaned to two other of Jirehouse’s clients. Jones was given the sentence by the High Court in London for failing to pay funds he had promised the court during the dispute, and for refusing to disclose the identities of certain people involved. Eyebrows were raised when it was discovered that Jones had previously worked for creditors of Scot Young, the controversial Scottish businessman and property developer who fell to his death from the window of his girlfriend’s flat in 2014 in murky circumstances.
As recently as January of this year it was alleged that Young had, in his later years, ‘laundered dirty money for Russian gangsters’. He had also been involved in a bitter divorce case with his ex-wife Michelle, having claimed to have lost all his assets in a property deal gone wrong. She strongly disputed this.
With the case over, Taymouth, now, finally, rests in the hands of DLC, although little is known about the terms of the deal.
DLC is, on the face of it, an unlikely owner of a Scottish castle. An Arizona-based property developer, it works mainly on private residential developments and clubs in the US.
Its glossy website advertises some of its previous properties, including a golf and beach club in Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, an ocean club in the Bahamas, and what it describes as the world’s only private golf and ski community, nestled in the Rocky Mountains. There is no mention of Taymouth Castle. DLC has, however, recorded more than $1billion in sales, which suggests it may just have the financial muscle to take on Taymouth and restore it to its sumptuous former glory.
The long-term view is not clear. In sharp contrast to DLC’s highend online presence, the only Taymouth Castle website available, believed to have been created by the previous owners, features nothing but a threeyear-old YouTube video with drone footage of the castle. There are some architect impressions of several modern lodges, and
the unfortunate promise that Taymouth Castle is ‘a unique opportunity’. The golf club, however, is still operational, although it is now shut due to Covid-19. Meanwhile, inside Taymouth, the grand corridors, halls and suites are silent, haunted only by the past, and perhaps, those long-resident ghosts.