‘Running a castle in Scotland isn’t easy – it’s not like Sussex, where you can charge £50 for a bunch of flowers’

Gordon Castle in Morayshire, Scotland was once one of the biggest houses in Britain.

Nearly a quarter of a mile from end to end, in its heyday it was described as “a world of a house”. The gardens were a paradise: as Lady Muriel Beckwith, a daughter of the house remembered, “the broad walk with its Portugal laurels set in green boxes and cut to resemble orange trees… gave to a small child the glamour of places distant and dreamed of.”

Its owners for the century from 1836, various Dukes of Richmond, were territorial magnates. In 1883, Charles Gordon Lennox, 6th Duke of Richmond possessed 286,411 acres, bringing in an income £79,683 a year (around £8.5m in today’s money), and Gordon Castle was the centre of his Scottish universe. It had, and still does, some of the best fishing in the land, and each summer the family made an official move by rail with plenty of regal pomp. 

The castle had been the seat of the powerful Gordon family since 1479, and when George Gordon, 5th Duke of Gordon died in 1836, his 269,000-acre Scottish estates, including Gordon Castle, passed to his nephew Charles Lennox, 5th Duke of Richmond.

But much has changed at Gordon Castle in the last century.

When Freddie Gordon Lennox, 9th Duke of Richmond inherited the dukedom in 1936, it came with £170,000 of death duties, a £250,000 mortgage, and hundreds of thousands of acres in Scotland that he did not particularly want. After all, the Richmonds are better known today for being the owners of Goodwood in Sussex (now a motorsport and horse racing mecca) and that was plenty to be getting on with. He began selling off the Richmonds’ Scottish estates, and in 1938, Gordon Castle was sold to the Crown Estate.

Freddie’s cousin George ‘Geordie’ Gordon Lennox watched as the sale went through. He was rather more fond of Gordon Castle; his father Lord Bernard Gordon Lennox, third son of the 7th Duke of Richmond, had been killed in the opening months of the First World War, and, missing a father figure, he had spent happy summers at Gordon Castle with his beloved grandfather. After the Second World War, he could see that the castle was deteriorating; having been used by the army during the war, it was falling down, riddled with both wet and dry rot.

He decided to take action. In 1952, he bought back the castle, and two years later knocked most of it down, leaving only the medieval six-storey tower and the two-storey east wing in an attempt to make it a reasonable place to live. 

“Everyone was knocking houses down in the 1950s,” says his grandson Angus Gordon Lennox, a former Grenadier Guards officer and Cazenove banker, “he had not a bean to rub together, and paid for the demolition with the lead off the roof.”

Freddie Richmond donated some paintings from Goodwood, and today, Gordon Castle remains a Gordon Lennox house, run by Angus, 59, and his wife Zara, 57. 

They took over the estate from Angus’ parents Bernard and Sally-Rose Gordon Lennox in 2008, and gave the castle a full makeover, so that it could be run both as an exclusive-use venue, and function as a happy home for their blended family of six children. Day to day they live in a house on the estate, but stay at the castle itself at various times of year, including during their annual Highland games.

Having done up the house, they began to diversify the estate’s income. In 2013, in collaboration with garden designer Arne Maynard, they started work restoring the eight-acre walled garden that had once sustained the Richmonds – not just because of a love of horticulture but as a means to build a brand.

Now, the garden produces the fruit and botanicals used in the gins, liqueurs and ciders, and the bath, home, and body products that they sell both in their shop and wholesale to hotels. It’s open to the public, with a cafe on site, where homegrown ingredients are used every day. In 2021, the garden won Historic Houses’ garden of the year award. They are rightly proud of it, but it is not yet economically viable.

“It was never open to the public before, and I’m proud that it is now,” says Zara. “I just need to make it work financially – I don’t want it to be a vanity project. We’re not like the big estates with a massive bankroll of money that keeps it going generation after generation. We’ve got to create that legacy and that financial security to be able to hand it on.”

The Gordon Lennoxes also run five holiday lets from cottages on the estate, plus the castle from which weddings can be hosted; having spent “millions” doing up all of the properties, they are yet to see a commercial return. Next year, they will launch a new shooting experience. Over six long weekends, guests will have the opportunity to shoot various wild birds over water, in the hedgerows, and on drives – as well as enjoying whisky tastings and a ceilidh in the castle.

And then there’s fishing, the Gordon Lennox religion. Salmon fishing over the family’s five mile stretch of the river Spey is available February to September, on what was once described as “the finest and most profound stretch of water in Scotland”.

It has taken a lot of hard work to get this far. The emotional attachment to family history and place is what keeps it all together, they say.

“If someone came to you with a business plan and said, ‘do you want to buy a castle with a few hundred acres and no income to support it?’ would you do it? Of course you wouldn’t,” says Zara.

“We’re doing it because there’s family history there, and you want to keep it going for the next generation.”

This is a common theme in the lives of those who run the country’s built heritage; it is difficult for many to detach from the pull of home. Keeping Gordon Castle going is “flipping hard,” says Zara. “Without the back-up of huge land or a street in London to support it, the only reason we can do it is because Angus slaved away in London to enable us to be able to retire up here.”

Life in utterly beautiful but remote Speyside, 60 miles from Aberdeen, is a challenge.

“It’s a whole different ball game to being in Sussex, Wiltshire, or Hampshire,” Zara adds. “I can’t sell a bunch of flowers for £50, or charge £35 for a main course up here. That makes everything incredibly difficult – you still have to pay the same wages. In Gloucestershire people don’t bat an eyelid at buying a bunch of sweetpeas for £10 – we sell ours for £3.

“We don’t have that clientele of ladies who lunch. We’re in a rural low-income area and we are very mindful of our local customers that have supported us, and keep us going through the winter.”

Life would be a lot easier if Gordon Castle could somehow move to the Home Counties. But they wouldn’t swap Gordon Castle for Goodwood. “Would I rather have Gordon Castle with 300,000 acres? Yes,” says Angus. “But if Freddie Richmond hadn’t sold it, we wouldn’t be here, so we’re either grateful or we’re incredibly stupid.”