A SCOTTISH TREASURE TROVE
With a sale of contents from Dunrobin Castle’s attics due to take place in Spring, Mary Miers discovers a time-capsule of upstairs-downstairs living in one of Scotland’s great ducal homes
With the contents of Dunrobin Castle's attic due to go on sale in the springtime, we take a sneak peek at what's to come
Country house attic sales have become something of a rarity these days, so the decision to declutter a magnificent Scottish pile promises to be a highlight for auction goers this year. The Dunrobin Attic Sale will offer treasures from the grandest building in the Highlands, many of which had been languishing for decades in the nether regions of the castle.
The event will be held at Bonhams’ Edinburgh saleroom on 20 April and, although it’s a pity that buyers won’t be able to view the objects in situ, something of the atmosphere of a traditional country house contents sale can be conjured up in the auction room, with dealers and collectors jostling to snap up affordable antiques and curios of excellent provenance. And always with the added thrill of anticipation that one of the lots might turn out to be an overlooked masterpiece.
As might be expected of the seat of an ancient earldom that became one of Victorian Britain’s richest dynasties, Dunrobin’s attics and cellars had become the repository for a fascinating accumulation of objects representing a domestic operation on a Downton Abbey scale.
Maids’ bedrooms tucked into the eaves were found to contain a hoard of porcelain and glassware, from piles of crested dinner services and floral footbaths to rows of carafes and copper jugs.
Rooms that had served as dormitories when the castle was used as a school in the 1960s housed stacks of paintings and gilt frames, firemen’s uniforms, pewter sugar moulds and tiger skins, their heads grinning from black bin liners.
Opening off dank basement corridors were cellars filled with bedsteads and luggage and a dark vault that even the castle manager had never visited, in which an assembly of marble busts and plaster casts, including Queen Victoria, peered through the cobwebs.
Among the lumber stacked up in the former servants’ quarters were vintage skis and electric fans, copper barrels and knife sharpeners, collections of arms and tartanware and an armchair upholstered in otter skin.
Dunrobin’s attics also preserve an archaeological palimpsest: a living document of the castle’s 800-year history revealed through exposed timbers and masonry, changing floor levels and unexpected chimneybreasts hidden from public view.
The building that rises today from its wooded setting on the lower slopes of Ben Bhraggie is an incongruous vision evocative of a Renaissance château, but this fairytale confection gleaming white above the Moray Firth dates only from the 1840s, when Sir Charles Barry remodelled the castle to a design based on the Château de Chenonceaux.
Encased within is a 13th-century keep, which had grown piecemeal through the 17th and 18th centuries to form the picturesque tower house that William Daniell depicted in his c.1819 aquatint, an offshore view that reminds us how the principal approach was traditionally by sea.
The Earldom of Sutherland is one of the seven ancient Scottish earldoms, dating back to about 1235. Over the next six centuries, the family would intermarry with royalty and spawn tough soldiers and loyal government supporters, but its influence remained largely localised.
All this was to change spectacularly in 1785, when Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, who had inherited the title and most of Sutherland (750,000 acres) as a young girl, married George Granville Leveson-Gower, whose soubriquet ‘the Leviathan of Wealth’ reflected the fact that he was heir to three English estates and one of the greatest fortunes of the Industrial Revolution.
A supporter of Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill, the liberal minded George Granville (the 2nd Marquess of Stafford from 1803) was a great art collector and agricultural improver, if somewhat eclipsed by his vivacious, artistic wife. In 1833, the year of his
“An offshore view reminds us how the principal approach was by sea
death, he was elevated to a dukedom.
Francis Chantrey’s statue of the 1st Duke of Sutherland rises from a monumental plinth high on the hill above Dunrobin. Visible from afar, it’s an emotive symbol of Highland landownership, for, despite the vast sums channelled into rural industries and philanthropic schemes to relieve the poverty of the tenants, the introduction of large-scale sheep farms masterminded by the Duke’s controversial agent James Loch involved the estate in that notorious episode of Scottish history, the Highland Clearances.
The Victorian transformation of the castle was the initiative of the 2nd Duke (17861861), who was mad about building and wanted what would essentially serve as a palatial shooting lodge for entertaining in the wilds.
It coincided with the growing popularity of the Highland Season, the annual migration of fashionable society that saw the aristocracy, gentry and nouveaux riches flocking north each summer with their rods and rifles, sketch books and copies of Walter Scott, to enjoy unrivalled sporting and leisure pursuits in a landscape of exhilarating grandeur.
Key to popularising their romanticised vision of the Highlands was, of course,
Queen Victoria, and it was the prospect of a visit to Dunrobin by her and Prince Albert that incentivised the Duke’s extravagant expenditure.
The royal couple’s trip never came off but in September 1872 the now widowed Queen made it at last to stay here as guest of the 3rd Duke and his wife Anne, her close friend and Mistress of the Robes.
The Queen described Dunrobin in her journal as ‘a mixture of an old Scotch Castle & French Chateau’ and noted that she admired the royal suite, which ‘had been specially arranged & handsomely furnished by the dear late Duke & Duchess for us’. Her ‘beautiful bed with white and gold flowers and doves at each corner’ can still be seen at Dunrobin.
In 1915, much of the Victorian castle was gutted by fire, the survival of contents being largely due to the fact that it was in use as a naval hospital at the time and most of the furnishings had been temporarily removed. The earlier ranges were saved by a chain of sailors, who ran along the roofs with buckets of water.
And so the public rooms we see today date from 1919, the result of a rebuilding by the leading Arts and Crafts architect, Sir Robert Lorimer.
Open to the public since 1973, they are among Lorimer’s most beautiful interiors, enriched by such treasures as the famous collection of family portraits by artists such as Sir Thomas Lawrence, George Romney, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Allan Ramsay, 18th-century furniture and Mortlake tapestries, marble busts and paintings by Tintoretto, Sir David Wilkie and Michael Wright.
Below the castle terraces, Italianate gardens are laid out with fountains and parterres and an 18th-century summer house harbours an unmissable museum of curiosities from Pictish stones to exotic taxidermy.
There’s a fine ensemble of estate buildings, many designed by the English vernacular revival architect George Devey, and even a private railway halt with its own halftimbered waiting room.
All this enhances the appeal of visiting the most magnificent house in the Highlands. Dunrobin Castle is, without doubt, a highlight of any North Coast tour.
“In 1915, much of the Victorian castle was gutted by fire