Dunnotar and Drum Castles

Emma and I have been visiting some of Scotland's finest castles with my sister Amy and her husband Ted this week. We started at one of our favorites...Dunnotar. We have been here twice already this year, but this castle is so unique and so well-sited that one could easily visit it repeatedly and never tire of it. It's a bit of a hike to the castle from the car park, but the views along the way are well worth the 180 (Ted counted them!) steep steps. This castle is in ruins, but enough of it remains to give visitors a fine picture of how it might have looked through the centuries.

While at Dunnotar, we also stopped at Drum Castle. This castle, unlike most of the ruins we visit which are managed by Historic Scotland, is a National Trust property. This means it has been donated to the historic preservation organization, and is often fully intact and furnished to one or more of the periods of the former occupants. In the case of Drum, the family that was given the castle by Robert the Bruce in 1323 passed it along to the NTS in 1975, after living in it continuously for over 600 years.

Tours of such properties often include a good bit of information about the family that lived in the castle, and to me this is only moderately interesting. I prefer to hear about the way the castle was used and altered through the years as people's habits and living preferences changed, no matter what their name was or how closely they were related to the queen. For example, at Drum, a visit begins in the Jacobean addition to the original tower and focuses on the collection of family portraits. We breezed through this, though I did notice that the late Laird of Drum bears a striking resemblance to Woodrow Wilson. From there, we passed through some additional sections that were added during the Victorian era, and ended in the medieval tower house, where the High Hall is still intact.

Drum also has a wonderful walled garden, which features a wonderful collection of historic roses. These weren't in bloom, of course, so we didn't get to enjoy them. Overall the garden was divided into four sections: one for the 17th century, one for the 18th, the 19th and 20th. This was quite an interesting way to display the historic collection, and we spent a good bit of time exploring each.

I preferred the 17th century section, which is a knot garden and features a medieval potager, which is a kind of a French kitchen garden and mixes fruit and vegetable crops with ornamental and medicinal herbs. I took literally hundreds of photos for my own garden idea album, but will spare you the information overload here. This section also included a series of very interesting woven willow structures, like the arch above.

Emma preferred the 18th century parterre garden, which was quite formal and featured tightly clipped hedges and mowed pathways, along with an impressive collection of perennials and gallica roses (or at least that's what the sign said they were!). One of our favorite features here was a sundial embedded into the flagstone patio. One steps on the center mosiac on the correct month, as Emma is doing above, and then one's shadow will point to the correct time. It's hard to tell from here, but Emma's shadow is just a hair off of the number "5", which meant that the garden was just about to close!

Me, Amy and Emma at the end of a day of castle touring!