Cluny Hill

In 1806 Forres built Nelson’s Tower at the summit of Cluny Hill to commemorate Admiral Lord Nelson and the victory at Trafalgar. The public tower became the hill’s most prominent landmark, but later historical investigation showed that it occupied the site of a much older defended enclosure, creating an unusual overlap between a national naval memorial and a prehistoric monument.

Antiquarian George Chalmers recorded the summit earthwork in 1807 as a strong rampart and a ditch 12 feet wide enclosing more than six acres. He also noted a small bank-and-ditch enclosure, ten feet square, to the south. His account preserves evidence that was important after the fort became difficult to distinguish physically in the following centuries.

The Ordnance Survey marked the hill as a British Camp in 1938, but by 1963 no obvious trace of a fort could be seen. Investigation in 2017 nevertheless confirmed the hillfort, measuring about 3.6 hectares or 8.9 acres. The sequence demonstrates how low-relief archaeological sites can remain real and significant even when their earthworks have become visually elusive.

The Cluny Hill Hydropathic Establishment opened nearby in 1864, marking a change in nineteenth-century hydropathy. It could accommodate a larger clientele—65 visitors were resident in its first July—and drew people from the local area, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cheshire and the Isle of Wight. Its scale required limited-company finance rather than the private partnerships typical of smaller ventures.

During the Second World War the hydropathic establishment was commandeered for troop use. It reopened in 1947 as the Cluny Hill Hotel under North British Hotels Ltd, but by 1975 was judged unprofitable and sold to the Findhorn Foundation for £60,000. The Foundation renamed it Cluny Hill College, giving the hill’s nineteenth-century health-resort building a new educational and community role.