Crathes Castle

In 1323 King Robert the Bruce granted the lands at Crathes to the Burnett of Leys family, the gift that began the family's four-hundred-year tenure of the estate. During the 14th and 15th centuries the Burnetts fortified the site not with stone but with a crannog, an artificial island raised in a nearby bog and defended with a timber stronghold, a method of defence common across the Late Middle Ages before the family turned to building in stone.

Construction of the present tower house began in 1553, but the work was repeatedly delayed by the political instability surrounding the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, and it was not completed until 1596, under Alexander Burnett of Leys. A further wing was added in the 18th century. Alexander went on to begin a new building project at nearby Muchalls Castle in the early 17th century, a reconstruction his son, Sir Thomas Burnett, would see through to completion.

In 1877 Sir Robert Burnett reworked the Great Hall, adding oak panelling and gilded leather in a deliberately antiquated style meant to convince his New York-born wife Matilda and her guests that the house was older than it was. He also bought new furnishings, mixing genuine antiques with reproductions he judged fitting. During these works, painted beam ceilings hidden beneath Georgian plasterwork were briefly uncovered and noted before being covered over again.

Those same painted ceilings, spotted but recovered in 1877, were finally re-exposed for good in 1913, revealing Scottish Renaissance decoration in several of the Jacobean rooms, among them the Chamber of the Muses and the Chamber of Nine Worthies. The rooms still display original furniture from this era, including a carved bed and two caquetoire chairs dated to 1597 and marked with the initials and heraldry of their original owners.

Crathes remained the ancestral seat of the Burnetts of Leys until 1951, when Sir James Burnett, 13th Baronet, gave the castle and its estate to the National Trust for Scotland, though the family continued to live in the house afterwards. Two years later, in 1953, the Great Hall was stripped back to its bare stone walls, removing the Victorian-era panelling and returning the room closer to its earlier appearance.

On 6 January 1966 a fire tore through part of the castle, badly damaging the Queen Anne wing and destroying entirely the quarters of Miss Jean Dodds, the Trust's on-site representative. The laird, James Cecil Burnett, was reduced to living in little more than a stump of the service wing. Architect Schomberg Scott had the Queen Anne wing rebuilt to its original two storeys while the Victorian wing was demolished, with a £65,000 insurance payout covering much of the cost.

In 2004 excavations at Warren Field, on the wider Crathes estate, uncovered a row of pits first spotted from the air as unusual crop marks. Analysis published in 2013 concluded the pits, dug some 10,000 years ago and used from around 8000 BC to 4000 BC, formed a device for tracking the lunar year, up to five thousand years older than the earliest comparable monuments recorded in Mesopotamia.