A family fortress in prime whisky country
GREAT ESTATES The Grants have lived at Ballindalloch Castle in Speyside for over 400 years. Eleanor Doughty meets the current custodians
Guy and Victoria Macpherson- Grant chose an inopportune time to move into Ballindalloch Castle. It was a sunny weekend in August 2014 when they arrived at their new home. Guy’s parents met them on the drive, and then left them to settle in.
The first day went without hitch, but when they woke up on day two, water was pouring through the ceiling in three places. “It was Hurricane Bertha,” says Guy, with a chuckle. “That was quite an epic time.”
The estate, in Banffshire, Scotland, has been in the Grant family since about 1457, with the first house built in 1546. This began as a rectangular fourstorey building with a squat tower, explains Guy. “It wasn’t very grand, but that’s what one built to secure one’s land, and it needed to be protectable.”
In 1645, Royalist forces attacked the castle, causing the family to flee temporarily. In 1718, Colonel William Grant added two wings, and in 1770, General James Grant, sometime Governor of East Florida, added another, to the north.
Later, the house was extended again, which turned this slightly tired fortress into a modern Victorian mansion. And so it has been ever since; today it has a 21,000-acre estate, much diminished from the 104,000 acres estimated to have been owned by the family after the Second World War.
Life at Ballindalloch today is all go: Guy and Victoria have three daughters – Ione, 11, Flora, nine, and Rose, seven. The castle is not just a tourist attrac- tion, but a place to do homework. It is home to the oldest herd of Aberdeen Angus in the world. There is also fishing on the Spey, grouse, pheasant and deer shooting, as well as farming, forestry, and, of course, a whisky distillery – for this is prime whisky country.
Guy, the oldest of three children to Oliver and Nancy Russell, always knew that Ballindalloch would one day be his responsibility. “It was something that I was happy to have at the back of my mind as I made my career choices,” he says. The house had been inherited through the female line so, in order to keep the family name going at Ballindalloch, Guy had to change his name.
After Eton and Edinburgh, he began a career in corporate law, before changing tack and studying for an MBA. “Pursuing a path in the legal profession was not something I wanted to do. I thought I’d do all the hard work, find that I was coming through to be equity partner in my mid-40s, and realise that there were responsibilities up here that needed to be taken care of.”
It is a big duty. “With the rights to the castle and the land also come the responsibilities of paying a wage packet to 34 people each month, and I don’t think that is something that one should forget. My brother has his inheritance, my sister hers, and that’s it. I have the responsibility of keeping this place going, and I didn’t have a choice in any of that.”
The house he inherited from his parents was in pretty good order, but there’s still plenty to do. The heating system is overdue an update. There’s no thermostat, nor time clock, and “the boiler is as old as me. There are three settings: you can either have no heat of any sort, hot water all the time, or hot water and heating all the time – but everywhere, even where you don’t want it. I don’t think my children, whichever one of them takes over, will thank for me not having had a go at that.”
Ah yes, the children. With no title, the Macpherson-grants are under no obligation to stick to the ancient system of primogeniture that has kept them at Ballindalloch for 24 generations.
But it’s less of an issue here than at other houses: with three girls, there’s no equality squabble.
“Being a beneficiary of primogeniture, following it would probably be our instinct. But it would be crazy not to keep one’s mind open.”
It’s a lot of work for whoever eventually takes the place on. Ballindalloch has 80- something rooms, with 18 bedrooms, 86 radiators, 19 fireplaces, 52 sets of curtains, and 62 sets of shutters, as well as the 21,000 acres outside. The castle is open to the public, and about 18,000 people visit each year. Getting people to come up to Banffshire has always been tricky, Guy admits. “We get sandwiched between the mountain biking nirvana that is the Cairngorms National Park, the flashpoint of Elgin, the allure of Nessie and Balmoral. Speyside, in general, gets missed out.”
It may be far away from civilisation, but there’s still a good community around them. “It’s nothing as cosy as the society in the Borders or in Perthshire, because there’s not the numbers of people around, but it’s like any other part of the world, you end up picking and choosing a bit,” says Guy.
When they came up from London, community was key, says Victoria. “It was so nice feeling part of the local community – the girls went to the local school, and we met families that lived here.”
The transition hasn’t been so hard, says Guy. “The world has moved on from when my parents came up here in the late Seventies, when things were much more structured. With the internet, you don’t feel so far away from where we were in London.”
In any case, he sings the praises of Speyside, and has developed a new route for the North East 250, a new Highlands scenic driving map through Speyside, the Cairngorms, the North Sea coastline, and the Moray Firth Coast.
“Speyside has all the advantages of having something to say for itself – we’re pretty lucky on that front – and to be anywhere else would devalue those special elements. We’re not close to anywhere: it’s an hour to Inverness, 90 minutes to Aberdeen, the best part of an hour to Aviemore. We’re sort of in the middle of things. One has to just get on with it.”
The castle is home to the oldest herd of Aberdeen Angus cows in the world